The Covid-19 lockdown is disturbing. But what are the creative possibilities of the space it creates
Like so many others, I’ve been deleting future events from my online calendar and, in place of the busy summer I’d planned, there’s a lot of blank space. Those vanished opportunities to feel active and useful remind me of Ernest Hemingway’s comment that the most frightening thing he’d ever encountered was nothing from his life of war and hunting. It was a blank sheet of paper.
If the future has vanished, the present has changed, and COVID-19 is affecting us in very different ways. Some people, very sadly, are bereaved; others are sick or fear sickness; there are lost livelihoods; and healthcare workers face extraordinary challenges.
My small world has changed in less dramatic ways, particularly as my son is home from school and my wife and I are having to be teachers as well as parents. The school’s advising us that children are already feeling disoriented and not to pressurise them with a strict learning regime. But it still feels like a responsibility and it’s hard to squeeze in long division and history projects while working from home.
My son, of course, has his own ideas. The other day my wife found him watching the hakuna matata sequence of The Lion King – the slightly cheesy bit where the meerkat and the warthog introduce the troubled lion cub to their ‘problem-free philosophy’. My son reached out his hand to his mother, saying: ‘Lets dance!’
Moments like that open up the creative possibilities of the blank space. Perhaps we all sense those possibilities, and notice how quickly we want to fill the space with our habitual ways of being preoccupied or busy. I’ve learned from my experience of going on retreat that it’s natural to feel disoriented, get bored and crave stimulation. The general Buddhist advice is to slow down. It helps to allow your feelings to be as they are without blaming yourself for not being perfect. And resting your attention on the body and breath is a great way to settle the mind.
In that space, you may encounter aspects of yourself that are usually drowned out by busyness and distraction. That can be disconcerting but it also opens up those creative possibilities.
The magic happens in the space that’s left by the plans which only ever existed in an imagined future, and have vanished, as the Diamond Sutra says, like a flash of lightening or a drop of dew.
That’s when we can go deeper. We can feel our connections with the people we can’t meet. We can dance with our children.
