We move into one month of a lockdown, and the experience has been rather exhausting. I perhaps didn’t realize that too much of relaxation could be so fatiguing! Strange times, and stranger for many others. I just got off a call with a client in Malaysia who shared she was in her sixth week of an un-permissive lockdown. There was no relaxation in the offing for the entire month of May.
While we, the grown-ups, find it not so hard to acclimatize to this drastically dormant lifestyle, the millennium born find it somewhat dissenting. There’s crankiness all around, and I’m surrounded with gloomy faces as though everything habitual for the youngsters has been shut-off from their lives. Living on but in a very sullen way- thanks to the online space that’s still holding them on.
Perhaps, this resigning comes to us not because we breathe in more patience as we age but out of the fact that we belong to an era where things came to us slowly. Being able to watch cartoons happened to us once a week. Getting our solid dose of entertainment was only on Sundays. Transiting from a black and white world to a world of colored TV was in phases with ‘Chitarhaar’ being the first colored program. We were almost alien to the concept of brands. Flaunting dresses designed differently was but stitched out of the same fabric for all the siblings. No exposure to fancy confectionary or shopping unless we went abroad. And ‘imported’ was the epitome of luxury [Where has this word vanished?].
Let me be a little more honest now, I do feel bogged down but have re-discovered things that make it a worthy trade-off. The birds chirp all day. The stars shine brighter, and the moon looks closer. I saw the mountains from my rooftop and a rainbow after it rained. I can hear the dogs bark at the farther end of the road in the afternoon . The days are quieter and nights are calmer. I learned what the meaning of “Essentials” is. I figured out Sunday is just another day with a set of three different alphabets. I survived without going to a salon [I thought this would be a killer]. I haven’t shopped for a month and still have way too much to need any more. I haven’t met anyone, and all the people I need are there, somewhere. There’s little of what I was living with. But now filled with so much I would have lived without.