HOW ARE YOU DOING?

How are you doing? Do you still have a job? How are you coping with isolation? Have you had it? How about your elderly relatives?

How awful, that in 2020, these are the questions with which we start a conversation.

This is my second COVID-19 post. The first was about fear and was prompted by the terror on the face of an old man I saw in the supermarket.

“Janet”, he shouted into his phone, “You’re not listening. I can’t get pork chops instead of lamb. There is no meat, no meat at all!”

I didn’t publish that post. It was too scared, too “what am I going to do?” to need to see the light of day.

So if I was doing badly ten days ago, and I was, how about now?

Strangely, I am mostly rather calm. To my own surprise I have achieved something that generally escapes me in more normal times, which is to stop my thoughts being dominated by an ugly cocktail of “things I should have done differently” and “things I can’t control”. I am fully aware of the danger this virus represents to my parents and others dear to me, aware of the risk to myself too, and yet I am calm. I am fully aware of  the havoc the virus has wreaked on my pension and my finances and yet I am calm. I am fully aware that the world is in greater peril than at any time in my lifetime, and yet I am calm.

Last week, my head only had room for these things and they flew around in panic like birds caught indoors. Day and night, it was incessant. I was frightened of how frightened I was. And frightened by that.

So what changed?

I have been able to access and control my thoughts and feelings in ways I would never have managed before this last year of therapy.

I’ve taken all the positive steps I can to ensure my parents’ safety as they go into lockdown. I have set up a new computer for them and my dear old dad has made his first Skype call! It’s not that I’m not worried about them, but knowing that I have done everything I can to make them safe and make this period bearable for them makes it possible to push my fear for them below the surface much of the time.

I have found, in a way I’ve not achieved before, that I CAN be comfortable with my own company and be productive when on my own.

I’m ashamed to say I used to feel that working in the garden was something I did for someone else and, as my relationship with my wife deteriorated, I resented it for that. Now I do it for the physical activity and for the pleasure of seeing what I have achieved at the end of the afternoon.

I have re-found the simple joys of making bread. A slow fermented sourdough provides a rhythm across two or three days: feeding the starter, making and shaping the dough, the bake itself; these things are set out through the days as staging posts on a journey. They give structure to time that could so easily be shapeless. Yesterday I took inordinate pleasure from the exchange of a loaf for six fresh eggs.

I have found new ways to connect with people. There’s more care running through those connections just now and I have both checked up on friends and have been checked up on myself. My poker game has moved online and we chat nonsense and lie about our cards, just as when we are in the club.

I’m alone but not lonely. I havent managed that before.

We stay connected, she and I. We walk together in the morning, chat during the day and whisper goodnight across the internet at bedtime. I miss her physical presence: the sound of her laugh, the feel of her skin against mine, but she feels so close in other ways.

An astronaut, with months of experience of isolation on the European Space Station, was on the radio this week. “Rejoice in the things you can control and don’t fight the things you can’t,” seemed to be her advice. I’m trying to take it.

These times are truly terrifying. I fear for my family, for my friends, for everyone really. But I feel satisfied to have controlled those things that can be controlled, I have become comfortable in my own skin and in my own company and I have learnt to take pleasure from small things.

I want these changes in my mindset to outlive COVID-19. I want that very much.