Yahoo Finance Seven ways to cope until the end of lockdown
Matt Haig on hope: ‘Look for the rainbow’
I always think it is interesting that arguably the most hopeful song of the 20th century – “Over the Rainbow” – arrived in arguably its darkest year. The Wizard of Oz, adapted from L Frank Baum’s novel, opened in cinemas on 25 August 1939, the day Hitler sent a telegram to Mussolini to tell him he was about to invade Poland. Within a week, the second world war was under way in Europe.
“Over the Rainbow” was the most popular piece of music in 1939, and has become shorthand for that bittersweet sense of being in tough times and walking towards better ones. Yip Harburg’s heartfelt lyrics speak of hope, but so does Harold Arlen’s music – and when the tune jumps a whole octave within the elongated “some-where” it flies over a metaphorical rainbow of seven notes to land on the eighth. And it is that leap that really feels like the essence of hope: half rooted in reality, half up in the sky. Half present, half future. Part Kansas, part Oz.
Of course, 1939 and 2021 are very different years. And sure, the felt-tip rainbows children drew in support of the NHS had become faded and sun-bleached long before the second wave of the pandemic crashed to shore, but hope is still in demand. The trouble is, hope can be hard. For every buoyant thought about vaccines, it is easy to sink back into a black hole of news and ongoing catastrophe. And it seems impossible sometimes to resist the downward gravitational pull of new strains and scary statistics and the sheer social, economic and psychological magnitude of all this.
This last year has shown us that, despite our collective flaws, we don’t easily give up on a better future
It is easy to feel, quite literally, hopeless. We might actively try to resist it and stay inside the low octave of pessimism. As gloomy old Nietzsche saw it, hope is the absolute “worst of all evils” because it prolongs our torments rather than relieves them. But that is defeatist, and this last year has shown us that, despite our collective flaws as a species, we don’t easily give up on a better future. I prefer Anne Lamott’s idea of how hope “begins in the dark – the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come”. Because that is the thing about hope. Its stubbornness. It is Emily Dickinson’s singing bird perched in the soul that never stops at all.
This actually gives hope a very real and practical purpose. Far from it being a Nietzschean torment, something that dangles like a carrot eternally in front of a donkey’s nose, reasons for hope can be found not just after despair but inside it. In the face of this slow-moving tragedy we have been living through, we have seen so many acts of everyday goodness and courage, in hospitals and care homes and on our own streets.
Maybe, then, the hope we could work to cultivate is less the passive cross-fingers-and-wait variety, but more the look-for-the-rainbow kind, or the sleeves-rolled-up-and-make-it-happen kind. In desperate times, beauty shines brighter. I can remember reading about how Steven Callahan, a sailor who was adrift at sea for 76 days, noticed through pain and hunger the sudden majesty of the night sky. He wasn’t noticing this beauty despite his life being in peril but because of it.
In depression I used to cling to such moments, even as the weight of illness pressed into my mind. Beauty shone like a promise of another world within this one. Even amid the collective trauma of this year, it is also still possible to detect a collective hope. “It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism,” observed the civil rights activist Angela Davis. So just as a virus highlights our interdependence on each other in an ominous way, hope shows how togetherness is as much solution as problem. Whether developing a vaccine or wearing a mask or shopping for a relative or contacting an elderly neighbour, there is always something we humans can do for each other.
Hope isn’t about waiting for a hypothetical future. Hope is finding the goodness in the dark and protecting it like a flame. Maybe – let’s hope big – we will emerge from this mass experience with a better idea of how we should live, just as we did after the second world war. And, in the end, we might not need ruby slippers because we have each other to lead us home.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is published by Canongate.
Ella Risbridger on food: ‘When this is over, I’ll have that joy again’
I have cooked my way through so many crises in my life: mental illness, family estrangement, a suicide attempt, the slow death of my partner and the complex grief that followed. I have found cooking to be a joy and a balm: a creative and practical distraction from pain, a way to love and be loved, a daily practice – like running or meditation – to centre a life around. It has been my reason, really, for living.
The week we lost my partner, I made pie, surrounded by white flowers and my best people. The day he was diagnosed, my friends spooned bolognese into my mouth, as if I were a baby. I made chicken soup like medicine for sad friends; I made bread and biscuits and brownies and blondies. The movement of the knife on the chopping board and the spoon in the sauce, it soothed me; it is not a stretch, really, to say it saved me. And so, last year, I thought I would cook my way through this, too. It made sense. When friends had a baby, in the depths of the first lockdown, we left a charred leek lasagne (Boursin in the sauce) on their doorstep. I perfected banana bread (coffee-cardamom), no-knead bread (thanks, Jim Lahey) and focaccia. I filled the freezer, found an Italian wholesalers to sell me pancetta and pasta flour, and hung out on Zoom making cardamom buns and neatly pleated dumplings. I got heavily into pastry. I was leaning into telephone therapy, and daily walks. We got a kitten. I was trying, and I was surviving, and we planned to paint the kitchen pink.
And then – I couldn’t do it any more.
I stood at the sink and cried. I wasn’t crying about the lack of cooking, but about everything else that we have lost
I suppose it can’t have been that I woke up one morning and had forgotten how to cook, but that’s how it felt: I woke up, and couldn’t remember how to care about cooking. It did not seem to me delightful to figure out a new recipe, but exhausting and depressing, to make no mention of the washing up. My beloved kitchen felt less like an escape, and more like a prison. I was, to be blunt, sick of it. I was sick of cooking just for us; sick of only eating things I cooked; sick of having to think of what to eat, and then having to eat it, and then having to clear away the evidence of having eaten it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten something exciting or surprising. I had no more energy, and no more ideas. I had loved cooking because it felt like a joy and a journey – and now it felt like nothing so much as one more chore to get us through another day.
I wanted to go out; to try some new cuisine, some new permutation of an old cuisine; to cook for someone else, and to be cooked for by someone else, someone new. I wanted some new ingredient, some new supermarket or quaint little deli. I wanted to wander through a market, coffee in hand, lazily contemplating just what, exactly, one is supposed to do with a celeriac. I wanted, in short, a reason to cook – and a reason to live, to like living – and I could find nothing. I stood at the sink and cried. I wasn’t crying about the lack of cooking, but about everything else that we have lost, everything else we missed, in-person therapy, a GP surgery that doesn’t feel actively dangerous, regular human contact.
I am, these days, so very lucky, and yet even for the luckiest of us, so much has been lost. The things with which I rebuilt my life – my friends, my family, my godchildren – are far from me, and I hate it. I am mad and sad and have nothing new to give, or even say here, except, maybe, this: hang on.
This is temporary. And so because it is temporary, I feel justified in telling you: do what you have to do. Don’t force it; don’t overthink it. I turned away from the sink, and ordered a takeaway.
My beloved housemate invested heavily in ready meals and packet pasta; frozen peas, easy peelers and cherry tomatoes. I ordered a bag of frozen mixed veg and a frankly unbelievable quantity of fish fingers; I bought bagels and smoked salmon trimmings; garlic bread and packet ramen. We will survive this, those of us who do, in whatever way we have to. We have to make our lives easier, and not feel bad about it. We have, I think, to give ourselves space to be sad; and space to love what we have, without pressure to make it more, to make it stand in for all that we have (temporarily) lost. We have to allow ourselves to miss things. We have to allow ourselves – and I use this word on purpose – to grieve. And as with all grief, we have to let it take the form it takes. Don’t push it; don’t force it; don’t try to make it look like anyone else’s.
I have cooked two meals, in the last six weeks. Both of them were roast chickens, and both of them were a joy, and I know, when this is over, I’ll have that joy again. It will be there; it has to be; and the kitchen will be there when it happens, just as the world will. “Listen,” says the poet Kim Addonizio: “Listen – I love you – joy is coming”.
Ella Risbridger is the author of Midnight Chicken & Other Recipes Worth Living For. Her children’s book, The Secret Detectives, will be published by Nosy Crow in June.
Adam Phillips on boredom: ‘Creativity comes out of being bored’
Broadly speaking there are two kinds of boredom. There’s the ordinary boredom that everybody feels, and with which children are very familiar: a pause or a period of hesitation when one is not preoccupied or involved in something; an ebb and flow of attention. It’s important to be able to be bored in that ordinary sense, because that is when one’s desire crystallises. This boredom is like a sort of compost heap; it’s a period in which things begin to emerge.
Then there’s another kind of boredom – the boredom that people are feeling now – which we experience when the situation is so unbearable that we work very hard not to be fully alive to it. This boredom is like a fog over the battlefield. If we allowed ourselves not to be bored, we would be acutely aware of how frustrated we are; of what we want and the fact that we mostly can’t have it; and of the scale of suffering of oneself and other people.
I’m always wary of being determinedly upbeat, because some people just need to be able to acknowledge how terrible this is
If we live at this level of frustration, one thing that can happen is that we become cynical and despairing and we give up on everything. Alternatively, we have the option of seeing what we can do with the little we’ve got. During this pandemic we have come to understand that we’re not immune, we’re not invulnerable, and in a way this grounds us. It’s not inconceivable that we could learn a lot from lockdown about how we actually want to live in the future, and how much we need as opposed to want. It may make us much more aware of how much we need each other rather than treating one another as commodities. How much we need contact. Lockdown might reveal to people which bits of their sociability seem superfluous, now, who they really want to see, whose company they enjoy and how they want to enjoy it. In our current predicament it becomes much more important that we do what we can to protect our real enjoyment, in doing things that genuinely engage us.
Another reason to tolerate boredom is that a lot of creativity comes out of being profoundly bored. It’s as though in boredom everything goes underground and things are cooking behind the scenes. But it would be unwise to say that boredom is creative in and of itself. Some people become stuck in being bored and some are frightened. I’m always wary of being determinedly upbeat, because some people just need to be able to acknowledge how terrible this is. It can be counterproductive to spend lots of time trying to boost each other, because it’s a huge amount of work and we know we are telling ourselves a lie, and that this is really terrible.
A great deal of how people cope with boredom depends on parents’ attitudes to their children’s being bored. Some parents experience this as a reproach, as if their children were saying: “If you were really good parents we’d never be bored.” Well, I think it’s the other way round. Children need to be able to bear the frustration of being bored and have the ability to wait to find something that really does engage them rather than being distracted with phony activity. A good experience of boredom would be one in which it is included in an ordinary rhythm of living.
Capitalism exploits our willingness and capacity to be bored. Dostoevsky said, “Man is the animal who can adapt himself to anything”, and it’s as if people have begun to wonder, “Well, is it actually worth being able to adapt yourself to anything? Is life really worth living in this condition?” If you’re asking yourself these questions, it might help to realise that there’s a repertoire of ways of bearing frustration. At one end there’s rage and violence and retaliation. But at the other there’s a capacity for kindness and some degree of mutual understanding that everybody is suffering and it’s something we have to come to civil and sociable conclusions about. It’s my hope that there could be a kind of sociability based on a mutual acknowledgment of frustration.
On Wanting to Change by Adam Phillips is published by Penguin.
Anita Sethi on nature: ‘Keep putting one foot in front of the other’
I am gazing into the heart of golden magic growing out of the mud. Crocuses. Springtime is peeping through the long, dark winter and, with it, sheer exhilaration at sudden startles of colour and life. If lockdown has led to a closing down of the world, it has also opened up my eyes, to a greater appreciation of the minutiae of nature within walking distance. As the great Rachel Carson wrote: “Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
Not all of us have an abundance of the natural world on our doorsteps and lockdown has exposed systemic inequalities of all kinds, including in access to nature. We don’t all live near woodlands, rivers or even parks. Stranded in my hometown of Manchester, attuning my eyes and ears to urban nature, never have I marvelled so much at blossom, at birdsong, and noticed what can grow between the cracks of a pavement.
I advise focusing on the tiny details – and in them a universe opens up.
I sought solace in audiobooks which transported me as far afield as the Australian Outback and the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges
Over the past locked down year, my feet have walked over blossom in springtime, crunched through autumn leaves and slid over snow. I’ve also been through weeks of self-isolation when all I could do was pace around the small room I was renting. That’s when I have found myself looking within and thinking back to the winters of my childhood and revisiting favourite far-flung journeys. During times of lockdown depression when I couldn’t move much at all, I sought solace in audiobooks which transported me as far afield as the Australian Outback (Tracks by Robyn Davidson), and the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges (Wild by Cheryl Strayed).
How to find a shred of solace or joy in the midst of such deeply anxious times? Some days in a lockdown that seems to stretch on forever it seems impossible. But if lockdown has taught me anything it’s the virtue of putting one foot in front of the other – however far those footsteps might take us.
Anita Sethi’s memoir I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain will be published by Bloomsbury in April.
Philippa Perry on sadness: ‘Process dark feelings into art’
In Portuguese, they have a word for which there is no direct translation: saudade. It means yearning tinged with resignation and the melancholy you feel longing for someone or something or a place you have lost. I feel saudade for sitting in cafes. It is a bittersweet feeling because it also means remembering lost pleasures. Saudade is the emotion behind the Portuguese melancholic, expressive fado songs. Giving full vent to this music is supposed to cleanse you of saudade. It is good for us to be able to process our feelings into words, art or music, and what with being locked-down by plague, there are dark moods around right now that might be more manageable if we processed them into songs, pictures or poems.
Count your blessings by all means but do not deny the right to discontent
In the 15th century, the trend in self-help was not about searching for happiness but learning how to be properly sad. The 15th-century monk Thomas à Kempis wrote about the “proper sorrows of the soul”. He says, “it is right to be sorrowful … It is a wonder that any man can ever feel perfectly contented with this present life, if he weighs and considers his state of banishment …” We are all going through banishment at the moment – feeling sorrow is appropriate. You do not need to make yourself feel worse by beating yourself up for not being happier just because other people have it worse than you. Count your blessings by all means but do not deny the right to discontent. That would be giving us two things to cry about. One, the causes of our sadnesses and two, contrition for crying about them.
There is a belief that to be artistic you have to be somehow tortured. For example, the 15th-century Italian scholar Marsilio Ficino thought his melancholic disposition was the seat of his creative genius. And Keats wrote: “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” Even today, many still believe that sadness makes a person nobler, elegant, more interesting. I don’t buy this myself, but if your sadness gives you any enjoyment, I will not get in your way.
I learned recently of a new label: situational depression. Well duh! If you are under house arrest and with a dose of saudade and possibly stress and bereavement it is appropriate not to feel like dancing. I think if we are too hasty to label ourselves as sick-sounding we will think that there is something wrong with us, rather than our merely having an appropriate response to circumstances.
One way we feed our frustration is by noticing how other people are reacting differently to the virus than we are. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote stories about how people responded to the Black Death in 14th-century Florence. Some attempted to carry on, but held herbs and flowers in their hands hoping to ward off the plague. Others shut themselves up in their houses and “live removed from every other person … never suffering themselves to speak with any nor choosing to hear news from without of death or sick folk”. Some peasants abandoned their crops and animals and pilfered from the houses of the rich who had long since departed to their second homes in the countryside. Others “carouse and make merry and go about singing and frolicking and satisfy the appetite in everything possible and laugh and scoff at the plague. They go to taverns and drink, ‘without stint or measure’.” Boccaccio was judgmental about such behaviour. Being angry with other people is how some of us get through. Blame is a normal outlet for anger. When we blame we project our bad feeling on to others and dump it with them. It can be difficult to own one’s own anger.
The scholar Tiffany Watt Smith (who wrote The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust) helped me with the references in this article. Strictly speaking I didn’t need any help, but as a way of getting through lockdown I recommend contacting an acquaintance on the slightest excuse to exchange woes and sympathy. Having a companionable Zoom call can be the difference between a bad day and a bearable one.
Phillipa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read is published by Penguin Life.
Mollie Goodfellow on friendship: ‘Reach out to someone you kind of know’
Just before Valentine’s Day I realised that I had not seen a friend in the flesh since last August. It was a very disconcerting thing to realise. For six months I have not hugged a friend, have not waited in a restaurant for them to arrive for dinner and have not secretly been pleased when they have cancelled drinks plans at the last minute. It’s heartbreaking and far too easy to feel as if you’ve lost all connection with your life. However, I’m trying to push through the bleakness and celebrate the friendships I have in the ways I can have them right now, so here is some advice – things that you could try too if you’re feeling the intense isolation of lockdown.
Try writing letters to loved ones – even if they live just down the road. Taking an old-school approach and sitting down to write a proper letter can be extremely therapeutic. For Valentine’s Day I sent out 20 cards to friends and got some in return. Receiving post is a highlight of my lockdown day.
I’ve found setting aside a dedicated evening for Zooming has done wonders and helps me build a weekly routine. Tuesday night is games night (it’s an exclusive club, sorry) and keeping it to once a week helps stave off the Zoom fatigue that crept in at the end of the first lockdown.
Embrace voice notes. I’ve always struggled with phone calls, they make me feel claustrophobic, but during lockdown being able to leave little voice messages to friends with whatever inane thought I have at that time, and eventually receive one in return, has been a joy. It’s a treat to press a button and hear a loved one’s voice but not immediately be put on the spot for a response.
In the last few months I’ve gone for brutal honesty when friends ask how I am – it takes the weight off my shoulders
It sounds like a strange thing to suggest when you can’t even go to the pub and see the friends you already have, but making new friends online can breathe new life into lockdown. I recently messaged someone I’d followed online for years – Cate, who makes incredible food and posts about it – and now we’re messaging every day. Reaching out to someone you kind of know could prove a lifeline for both of you; perhaps they are a new neighbour or a friend you lost touch with years ago.
Finally, something that sounds obvious but I’ve only really grasped in the last few months is the concept of being really honest with your friends. I think we’ve all spent the last year going through the rigmarole of saying: “Oh you know, getting by!” But in the last few months I’ve gone for brutal honesty when friends ask how I am. Not only does it take the weight off my shoulders, but it lets my friends know they can do the same with me.
Mollie Goodfellow is a comedy writer and journalist.
Nikesh Shukla on play: ‘Lego can help you through lockdown’
I couldn’t have got through lockdown without Lego. I have been playing a lot with Lego. I’ve learned so much about myself because of Lego. I dream about Lego. Unable to attend any gigs last year, we built our own concert venue and crowd. When I was trying to figure out a scripting issue, I built the scene and played it out. When I wanted a conversation with my kids about us going back into lockdown, knowing they would take it hard, missing their family and friends as they were, I told them while we played Lego.
On the floor, with my kids, each of us concentrating on whatever we’re trying to build, making suggestions, encouraging each other, playing has been a blessed oasis away from the Zooms and the empty Word document with the blinking cursor shaming me for not writing and the endless notifications and emails.
Play can stimulate your imagination. If I place myself in front of a screen all day, then spend all evening working my way through nine seasons of a sitcom I’ve seen before while I doomscroll social media, I feel empty. I am passive, a passenger. Playing with my kids has been a real reminder for me to lean into my imagination, build worlds and develop characters, be out in the world within the sanctity of our home and interact with each other in unexpected ways. It alleviates the drudgerous feeling where every single day feels the same. Also, it means I get to have fun with my kids, on their level.
Lego aside, we’ve also created detective mysteries for each other, dreamed up themed scavenger hunts and been superheroes rescuing the world from monster werewolves wanting to steal our teddy bears.
A few weeks ago, my kids were upset, an argument had occurred and neither was talking to each other, nor would they tell me what had happened. I poured the Lego on the floor and we played. As they concentrated on what they were building, the pressure off, we were able to have an honest conversation about what had happened, all while trying to build the tallest structure we could.
Every day feels the same for my kids. But playing with them has helped us all to see each day in a new light, because we don’t know what it might bring. Though it’s true that I still haven’t quite got used to the pain of standing on Lego pieces in the middle of the night.
Nikesh Shukla’s Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home is published by Bluebird.
