AS RECENTLY as mid-February, yes of this year, if somebody mentioned the phrase, “social distancing,” we would have associated it with a lovers’ quarrel — I don’t want you near me, you beast. Yes, no flowers on Valentine’s Day, and no responses to text messages, except — let’s just move on. But starting mid-March, we just got caught up in the health crisis and we could talk of nothing else. Social distancing had lost any romantic connotation.
Because we were mostly locked down at home, there were no real conversations outside of family concerns like money, and how fast it seemed to dwindle, and an inordinate amount of time spent on news related to the pandemic. These included the trophy for best countries and how they were able to avoid the contagion, led mostly by mothers — women seem to know how to handle panic. Then there were the promised cures being tested, the vaccine going into human trials, and, yes, how the new normal was going to unroll — forget friendships and birthday parties. What about the hit on the economy, the resulting loss of jobs, the closing of businesses. We were working ourselves up.
Can we change the topic now?
Is this attempt to think of something else just a coping mechanism, in the form of denial? Of course. How else can we move on with life? Here are topics we have almost forgotten because of that pandemic elephant in the room.
Is office politics having to do with back-stabbing of rivals, grabbing credit for someone else’s ideas, and moving to a bigger room passé? How can you throw out casual snipes (what is his value added?) for the boss to digest if nobody is around? The only meetings are taking place with everybody in the loop.
If most are working from home and dealing with the distractions of children also out-of-school, and competing for computer time, what happened to the issue of work-life balance? Okay, that is still related to the big “P.”
Let’s try again.
What about social graces? Eventually, we will be going out to weddings and wakes where we will meet strangers from the bride’s side of the family, or cousins of the departed. There will be social gatherings again, not just of serenaders. How do you introduce yourself if you are among the lucky ones who still have a business or a job? What do you do? Staying at home and waiting for meetings. Your office? Oh, you gave that up and now work from home. See how complicated it gets.
You can see how hard it is to pick a subject totally unrelated to the P. Even when they do come up with the vaccine, the overhang of the quarantine woes will come up and, like a contagion too, affect future topics of conversation. Perhaps, conversations will eventually be unmoored from this health crisis. We haven’t talked about the volcanic eruption for a while. And Marawi just popped up in the news radar for a bit.
Maybe when we get back our cultural moorings, we will have more interesting things to discuss. Theater will not be seen only over YouTube. In a few months, maybe next year, there will be musicals again you can watch live, where you don’t have to wear face masks, unless you’re in the cast of Phantom of the Opera as one of the ensemble cast for the song, “Masquerade.’
It’s not just the economy that got whacked by the lockdown. Psychological phobias like the now instilled fear of crowds have also unraveled the social fabric of culture, values, and social bonds of long standing. (Can you still trust your regular barbershop?) Somehow, we cannot help talking about what we are afraid of. Maybe, changing the topic allows us to focus on other things, like disposable income and foodie hunts.
Life shouldn’t be overwhelmed by just a single concern. There must be other things we can talk about with other people again. We need to stretch our mind and explore old topics. T.S. Eliot puts it best in his “Four Quartets”: “We shall not cease from the exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.”
Tony Samson is Chairman and CEO, TOUCH xda.
