Social distancing before Coronavirus

way before.

Social distancing is trending due to global health and safety concerns. Most European capitals are quarantined, our social freedom is confiscated due to force majeure, and inevitably we end up looking at social and human interaction with nostalgia.

Umh… wait-a-minute, before you get your tissues out, doesn’t it sounds all too familiar? We end up missing someone just because they are no longer there when we actually never showed we cared? Ouch! Right there, square in the face.

While we long to return to normality, let’s just take a moment to remind ourselves what normality really looked liked before Coronavirus, and about the 159 million opportunities we had to connect with other fellow humans and instead preferred to:

• Put our big-mac headphones, soundproof our breaths, and simply lock people out;
• Do everything we could to avoid eye contact and human contact just because, well just because we could;
• Pretend people around us simply did not exist;
• Swipe our phone relentlessly when somebody was actually talking to us;
• Dive into a screen to forget about everything and everyone;
• Stop listening and stop caring.

Are we, once again, nostalgic of a past that never belonged to us? Is it guilt? Or is it a lesson we just can never remember and hence need to repeat over and over again.

What’s so hard to remember? Can we not learn once and for all that people matter immensely, that relationships give meaning to our lives and ourselves, and that they are the only thing that allows us to grow? Do we really need a global catastrophe to remind us of our human and universal interconnectedness?

The brutal truth is that more often than we are ready to admit we prefer to withdraw and ignore, sinking a little deeper into our coats, hoping to disappear when our human presence is needed. While we enjoy our individual freedom to hide, we are escaping the collective responsibility we share, the responsibility to be there and care for one another, because we are that one another, and every time we are present for each other, we are present first and foremost for our present and future selves.

Neither a virus nor distance can make us grow apart unless we decide so. Let’s not need a global pandemic to remember the immense power we hold as individuals and communities across time and space, in shaping our realities and the world we want to live in.