Floating in space: notes from 2020 #2
This is how I ended update #1 in March:
“My plan is to write another post in early May 2020 with further stubbornly optimistic thoughts. But I realise that we’re all about to face a difficult time as Covid 19 takes hold. Wishing everyone who reads this well between now and then.”
Even as I wrote them I had a sense that I hadn’t really understood the true nature of the immediate catastrophe that was swallowing us. My brilliant friend and business partner, Charlie Peverett, had described it that day as being like what it must be like to watch a tsunami heading in towards you as you stand on the shore with no escape to high ground (an image that I often have as a recurring dream) and I knew exactly what he meant. But somehow I couldn’t make the tsunami wave feel actual. It was a cartoon. Maybe I’ve watched too much Studio Ghibli? It was Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. It wasn’t real.
Of course, 8 weeks later it’s real enough. The wave has broken all around us and so far the brutal reality of its power has taken one beloved family member. As I am washed away by the force of it, resistance, rage, grief, despair and optimism (stubborn or delusional) feel meaningless. They won’t make any difference to what has already happened. Right now, they feel woefully inadequate responses to what might be coming next.
I am floating in space.
I was so focused on the future — on what we needed to do to avert the catastrophe of climate chaos and natural devastation. What we still need to do. But looking forward at the moment feels more than ever like gazing into the abyss and it makes me dizzy.
I am floating in space and waving at my friends and family who I can see floating past me, weightless and untethered just like me.
I hope, desperately, that no one else I love is claimed by this disease or the catastrophic failure to step up to the challenge that characterises the government’s response so far. (Is it incompetence? Is it deliberate? Is it a messy combination of both things? Why are we still in denial about how bad this really is?) And I realise that sounds selfish. Someone loves every person who is claimed by the pandemic.
I am floating in space and trying hard to find something under foot to land on.
Here’s where I’ve landed today. It’s an effort to make sense of things by talking to others and hearing their stories. I’m calling it The Secret Dreams Project. If you’d like know more — read the link and get in touch.
I hope to be back with update #3 in July. Sending love to all who read this x
