Quarantine: the cure?
Three months ago if someone would've told me about this whole situation i would've laugh about it; now though, i find myself wondering: should we have known this, would we have been prepared?
The answer to that would've been, and is: absolutely, NO!
The menace, this time, is something very little yet very common, a Virus, a newly found cousin of the common cold; as it turned out though, this a**hole cousin it's coming from the bad side of the family and the common cold turned out to erratically transform itself into a not-so-common kind of pneumonia.
This edgy behavior scares us and prevents us to create a proper protocol to cure the diseased, resulting in a not-so-common number of deaths or severely ill people.
The whole epidemiological point of view is scary yet fascinating; reading some books about it( shout out for “Spillover” by David Quammen) gives you a distinct picture of the precarious, yet unheard of, situation we live day by day, with many and more lurking little menaces just waiting to do a little jump to wipe out the entire humanity!! (i'm stretching things here to create pathos...no worries).
How we cope with that? Honestly, it's not so easy.
Where the individual is the victim there's some higher form of authority that must intervene and try to put a patch in the bucket to prevent water from spilling out; governments though, rarely face something of this kind of proportions and, as it turned out to be, some of them, mine at least (Italy n.d.r), failed to actively and promptly cope with the explosion of the pandemic.
Many interests at play here, really important but boring matters, let's not delve into them but move onto one aspect everyone can share in its own personal way; the first, active response to this pandemic, the quarantine.
“Quarantine: a state of enforced isolation.”
We're creatures of many opposites, for we are individuals so we value our singularity and yet we're social so we value our common traits
Our whole life have been ruled by this feeble tension, a tension broken now by this “enforced isolation”; the Ying of the self is forcibly separated by the Yang of the communal share and we discover that, in the end, we're all alone in the trench.
Daily routines changed, jobs interrupted, the thoughtful and the superficial alike forced to look themselves in the mirror and, perhaps, to take by hand their forgotten dark side.
We're creatures of many opposites for we walk in the daylight, hand in hand with our shadows
Far from the loudness of the office, the traffic of the road, the ever ringing telephone, we discovered again the beauty of silence, the joy of the low rythm and, maybe, we had the chance to play again peek-a-boo with the little demon spying us from under the bed.
Me? My demon is everything i've put aside, every fear untold, every passion not cultivated, every person i merely greeted on a daily basis. Those thing i found myself reaching to, when everything else failed to fill up my life. Those things are what i think i should value more. It's seems so easy to do, really, and yet i ended up forgetting it. That's quite the lesson i struck myself on, here.
We're creature of many opposites for we're dancers, dancing on a razor blade
Could this big wave of self centered thinking end up be what many people needed? It can provide them personal growth, it can give them a higher point of view on all mundane things, it can give them the chance to stop an find again their center of balance so, in the end, yes. I think so.
We need balance. I need balance. Nature needs balance. (i read WIN here, i don't believe in coincidences...)
The virus “jumped” and broke the balance in the first place, spreading a wave of change like a rock tossed into the pond.
But i might be wrong here, i'm merely a little frog in that pond.