Three Ways to Stay Calm in the Coronavirus Storm

29th March 2020

It’s always strange seeing your own bones. A sobering reminder of how I’m a fleshy skin-encapsulated and vulnerable human animal.

These were the thoughts going through my head this morning as I watched an x-ray of my ankle displayed on a screen in A&E.

Yep… I went to the hospital today, probably the last place anyone wants to be in the middle of a pandemic.

But an unexpected twist of my leg when running this week, accompanied with an audible crack, balloon swelling and a blue tinge, couldn’t be ignored any longer.

For four days, I found myself in a catch-22 situation, weighing up the danger of exiting my cosy isolation hole to step into a virus hotspot, with a potentially broken foot getting more colourful by the day.

I made the decision to go (to the conveniently located hospital, 5 minutes from my house), and without a car, I hopped on a bike, scooting with one foot like a canoe rod to concrete, while my partner Simone pushed from behind up the hills. With one trainer and one flip flop, we entertained an otherwise empty street as construction workers pointed us in the right direction.

We covered our faces with bandanas, pulled on our gloves and opened the hospital doors with our elbows as the jingly change in my coat pocket signalled my one-legged pogo stick arrival. To an empty room.

For the first time ever, I experienced no wait in A&E, coming in and out of the door in 40 minutes.

The nurse who met me was dressed in the familiar armour I’ve seen on global news sites. There was little to recognise beyond her eyes, due to her face mask, scrubs and gloves covering most of her skin. As she entered my two meter bubble to check my temperature as protocol, I felt an emotional twinge for health workers of the world. Here she was, like everyone else working in the walls of hospitals right now, risking her life for her low paid profession.

I then had a backwards tour of the hospital as I was wheeled to the x-ray department, silently sliding through the moments of ambulance drivers’ melodic conversations, and the heavy air surrounding blue-coated individuals in a quiet contemplation. White-haired people lay horizontally as machines breathed for them. Familiar red spikey molecules peppered my peripheral vision on the hospital walls.

I sat on my hands so not to touch my face as I waited to see the x-ray. Everything was intact. The doctor cracked his knuckles to explain how the snap I heard was normal, handed me a leaflet and sent me on my way.

Contemplating my human vulnerability reflects what I expect a lot of people have been feeling these past few weeks.

Coronavirus has hit like an unexpected tsunami. Two weeks ago I’d just finished a normal working week after returning from a skiing holiday for my birthday.

I’m now feeling grateful to be probably one the last people this year to have had a good celebration.

The past 7 days, I’ve barely left the house and witnessed 95% of my work wash away in the wave. As a newly self-employed person, I discovered this week that I’m not entitled to government support.

But despite a seeming disaster, I’ve been feeling calm amidst the storm.

My current state of mind is cradled in the arms of these three ideas…

1. Zoom out.

Nothing has soothed me more than big picture thinking at the moment. From way up here, my small life is a spec of sand on the beach, and my problems a gust of passing sea breeze.

This is so much bigger than me.

Every person on the planet has been affected by this crisis in some way. That alone provides enough solidarity for me to feel more connected to people I don’t know than ever, and I actually feel more supported as a result. I feel grateful for being in a position where I can sleep, eat and exist easily. I know, as we all do, that this isn’t the case for countless people across the world right now.

As a result, empathy is in the air. We’re aware everyone is struggling. We’re collectively looking for ways to give a hand up.

Interestingly, the etymology of “compassion” is Latin, meaning “co-suffering.” Through our shared struggle, we’re finding a common humanity.

Welfare is being placed before profits. Public before private. We’re paying attention to segments of society we’ve previously ignored in our elderly and vulnerable. We’re noticing those genuinely holding us all together are our least respected and lowest paid — our health workers, supermarket staff, delivery drivers, cleaners.

This collective thinking changes everything. It’s breaking down the walls we built between each other, as we ironically sit with actual walls between us.

Covid-19 doesn’t listen to borders. The common denominator of this disease is being human. No amount of money or fame or power can change that.

Covid-19 doesn’t care about our differences — it’s about how we are the same.

This crisis could be the ultimate equaliser. An opportunity to discard the divisive thinking which has dominated our politics in recent years and our wars for eternity and realise we’re all spinning on this giant rock through space together.

And that rock is all we’ve got in a solar system of dusty, lifeless planets.

But ours is a living, breathing, thinking and feeling being which we’ve been treating as a pile of resources and a rubbish dump for too long. If we continue our business as usual once we recover, it too will reach the same fate.

Zooming out, it’s clear this crisis is our wake up call to change the path we’re on.

At its core, this illness is a reflection of the damage we’ve been doing to the earth. Because, despite it feeling unlikely in our glass-lined concrete jungles, we are part of the same nature we’ve been dominating for millennia.

This whole time, we’ve only ever been destroying ourselves. Is it any wonder, following the recent fires to our forests — the lungs of the earth — that we too experience a respiratory disease?

Nature has stamped on the brakes. Society has stopped. Our lives placed on pause.

Could this be the earth’s own immune system defending itself? Is this our final call to retreat our attack on the planet?

This isn’t a half time break. This is an urgent opportunity for us to radically alter the way we do things around here.

Already, the earth has been given time to catch its breath. Smog over Beijing’s skyline has finally cleared, Venice’s waters are transparent again. Within weeks.

We’re witnessing the earth’s ability to heal — fast. The clear message is — we need only give her a chance.

Right now, we too are getting a breather as humans. This marathon of growth has been long and exhausting. Let’s breathe and stretch out for a second.

We’ve been running an endless chase of growing bigger, better and faster. But the finishing line only ever recedes further to the distance as a hazy mirage, wreaking havoc in our wake.

As we slow down, strip back to the essentials and remove all the distractions — the busy schedules and endless choices — we will realise that we’re okay. We adapt. We’re still here.

This time inside is a test — as the outside world keeps turning — to pause and notice we have all we need on the inside.

So maybe instead of an endless marathon, we can take a light stroll.

This ‘apocalypse’, as some have called it, is not the end of the world, but the end of an era. Optimistically, it’s the beginning of a new one. For society to fall to its knees so quickly, is enough proof that we need a new system. We need new leadership which takes into account the new sets of problems we will inevitably experience now. As the climate crisis catches up with us, governments must protect not just its people, but its nature. The capabilities of our world leaders, whether they’ve acted in favour of health over wealth, and protection over power, will emerge in the comparable numbers of deaths on their heads when Covid-19 passes. The modern world’s endless pursuit of growth has reached its plateau, and on the other side is a sheer drop. It’s become clear what is at stake here.

Zooming out, I feel a revolution brewing in the minds of the young. In the unravelling of what we’ve known so far, new threads are ready to sew. Our great grandchildren are anticipating our every move.

2. Accept what has happened.

Life as we know it has transformed in a matter of weeks. The knock-on effects of the pandemic have reached every corner of our daily lives. It’s quite literally been a shock to the system, individually and for civilisation.

What seemed normal recently - going to the pub for a pint or working out at the gym - is quickly beginning to feel like a distant memory.

And the waves keep rolling in — every day, another limitation on our freedom and routines is introduced. The cherry on top, is we have no idea when it will end.

So surreal is this situation, that yesterday my Dad said he woke up thinking what is happening was a bad dream. The sci-fi movie no one thought to write because the ‘end of the world’ was not a pyrotechnic extravaganza, but a slow and silent shrivel.

It’s a tough pill to swallow. Denial or despair are sensical responses.

But there’s an easier way through. You don’t need to get caught in the whirlwind.

Non-acceptance is like swimming against the torrent of a raging wild river. Eventually you’ll be too exhausted to swim, and the flow is taking you in the direction you need to go anyway. So you might as well lie back and let it take you.

Here’s something I wrote in my journal last summer, and a thought I’ve been dipping into recently:

I had a moment in the ocean earlier of pure joy. I laid back and let the water carry me, as if I was lying in bed. I stretched out as long as I could reach. There wasn’t a single thought of ‘trying’ to float or swim. I just trusted the water. It was the most perfect feeling of support. Quite literally having my back. It made me feel deeply, how whatever happens, the earth’s got me. I swam at eye-level with the birds as they sat on the water’s surface, thriving without the need for man-made structures of survival — money, property, or status. I got the familiar reassurance of ‘everything is and always will be ok’.

Acceptance doesn’t mean ‘get over it’, to ignore the pain you may be feeling or the turmoil that’s unfolding.

Actually it’s quite the opposite — it’s going into the pain and allowing it to be there. Acknowledging it. Sitting with it.

I think pain is as much a part of life as joy. They are two sides of the same coin.

Two ends of a spectrum of what it feels like to be alive.

But us humans do something to pain which transforms it into something worse.

We dwell and we resist. Pain becomes suffering.

Have you ever witnessed emotional pain in the eyes of animals? (I’m pretty certain I saw my gerbil cry when it’s partner died as a child…) But soon enough they move on, the feelings pass, and they continue with their lives.

Similarly in the natural world, the plants don’t mind the wind. The trees don’t put up a fight when they’re torn down. They live in complete surrender. They take it as it comes. They flow where life is going.

We may not have control over what happens in a situation, but we have control over how we react and experience it. And that makes all the difference.

Acceptance doesn’t mean to feel complacent about what’s happening.

Because the situation we’re in is as bad as we speculate — maybe worse.

Every forest fire like Australia’s recent blaze, every summer which breaks the temperature records of the last, every pandemic which sweeps the globe will wake us up to the scope of this crisis we’re facing and the weight of our loss.

Of course, our reaction of subdued rage and despair silently bouncing off the ceilings of our homes as this sinks in is an expected response.

But acceptance doesn’t mean to iron over our emotions. It’s important to recognise them in order to move past them.

When I lived in a van for 8 months, I existed mostly in nature, effectively as a fly on the wall of society. Without having to worry about making enough money to pay rent, or being distracted by goals or entertainment, it was hard to ignore the comet heading our way. It seemed that civilization was too busy looking ahead at a future destination to notice it. I felt like I was in a crazy vacuum dream where the alarms were silenced. At times, it felt nightmarish.

Suddenly we all hear the alarm. And strangely it’s just as silent. Reverberating inside our individual heads. You need only listen to the quiet streets to notice it.

But I can say from experience that on the other side of the despondency, is an urgency — to live beautifully. To cherish what we have. To spend time on important things. Accepting your current situation will get you over the mind hurdle quicker.

Waving goodbye to the life we’ve known may feel like a suffocating change — even a kind of death, but it’s merely shedding of skin to make way for the new. Acceptance is knowing the skin will grow back again, and what grows will become our new and stronger outline.

3. The only time is now.

Before things got serious, I played a catastrophising game with some friends. We told our own versions of potential apocalyptic stories a few dominoes ahead of where we are now.

Wading through the red dust in our imaginations from our Mad Max-esq cinematic upbringings, we envisioned times where money has no value and water is currency, how the earth recognises human beings as a cancer and this is the beginning of an extermination mission. How this is a global totalitarian regime in the making, replacing our basic human rights with fear and control.

A million forks in the road have now presented themselves. But the truth is, none of us really know what is going on here, and what we have in store.

I’m sure we’ve all tried to peek around the sharp corner in front of us to guess what’s ahead. And I expect we’ve also met the familiar shadow of the buildings blocking our view, making things seem exaggeratingly shady.

Ultimately, whatever future we have in store, doesn’t exist yet.

Catastrophising only projects us onto the fictitious walls of our own imagination — inside our heads. So how can we ever fully pay attention to what’s going on in the room? Where do we go when we have those thoughts?

The present moment is the only place where anything has ever happened and the only place it ever will. The past is always behind us, the future is yet to come.

Of course, there’s a place for planning ahead, for ambition, for reflection — but too much time indulging in the mind will pull you away from reality, and soon enough you’ll be riding a vengeful downward spiral. So take each moment as it comes. D-day is yet to arrive.

My best bet is, you’re reading these words from the comfort of your home, you have clothes on your back and food digesting in your stomach. Ask yourself — is there really a problem with this very moment right now?

Future projections aside, in the conversations I’ve had with loved ones amidst this crisis, I’ve noticed many people are paying a visit to their past at the moment. Mulling things over. Taking a step back and taking a look at their lives.

I think it’s a wonderful thing to be introspective, but again, the past has been and gone. It’s no longer our current circumstances. Like our catostrpohisting, it’s pulling you away from the one place which truly exists, and where you truly have control over your life.

Without plans in our diaries, time feels different. Sluggish perhaps. There’s no train to catch or date to get to. We’re not segmenting our days into time slots and fitting ourselves into the boxes. Days are blurring. Moments are stretching out. Time is almost dissolving.

Here and now, in the slow moment, things are still. Things feel pretty good. Things aren’t so dark.

Put down the past and future and pay the present moment a visit as often as you can. It’s key to staying in the eye of the storm.

Wishing you all strength and love in this time.

Becky

(All pictures are my own).