Pam Morrison
There is a book, a memoir by Wendy Parkins, that has been sitting on the fold-down oak hall table opposite my bedroom for over a month, in the appointed position for objects that are due for return. It didn’t beat the lock-down and so it sits, mute, uncannily prescient, and currently a triumphant personal declaration. Every morning, so far, I’m alive. For now.
The book’s title has captured a potent truth. For here I am, self-protecting by order, sealed in my home in a transformed world, where every morning I hear of tens of thousands more who are no longer alive. They are the mounting daily toll of the dead. This is news to no one, yet as I read it again, punched into words on my computer, I find myself reeling. Just two months ago, I sat under the canopy of a sprawling sycamore at the bach, encircled by friends. From memory, no-one made mention of the plague that was to come. We simply had no idea.
Right now there are now more people in lock-down than were alive during World War 2. I’m sharing the experience of confinement with 2.6 billion other humans. I find this out on Google, as I flail for information that will anchor this experience for me. But of course that doesn’t anchor me at all. If anything I feel even more unmoored, less able to situate myself in relation to anything I once knew to be true. The big picture has lost its edges.
Mindfulness teaches us to notice our thoughts. Recently I read Switch on Your Brain by Dr Caroline Leaf. She proposes a step by step scenario in which we notice, yes, our thoughts, but go further, to notice the attitude of our thoughts, and then go further, to change the thoughts. Radical stuff, she calls it DIY neurosurgery.
