I stood on a beach today for the first time in close to six weeks, and looked at the sea.
There’s at least 100 beaches within an hour’s drive of our house (we do live on a narrow isthmus on a small island at the bottom of the world, after all), but I couldn’t go to them. New Zealand’s strict national lockdown ended at midnight last night, and for the first time in what feels like an age, we could do a little bit more today than we did yesterday.
We’re not fully out. Level 3, as they call it here, is still pretty stern. Fast food and takeaway restaurants are open, many people are finally getting to work again and we can drive a little further, but most of society is still hunkered down for a few more weeks, likely. New Zealand and our Prime Minister’s firm, authoritative response to the Covid-19 pandemic seems to have worked well.
What did I do during the great lockdown of 2020? I worked, a fair bit more than normal, picking up extra shifts because what else was there to do. I painted walls. I fussed about the house organising boxes of old letters and heaving book shelves and music magazines I’d inexplicably kept since 2013. Every day for the duration of Level 4 I posted a comic book cover of a character in prison (or lockdown) on my Instagram account. It turns out that’s a pretty fertile genre. My son played video games with his friends online, built cool models and ventured into online schooling. My wife catalogued trees and trapped rats. We all went for a lot of walks around our hilly neighbourhood.
And I worried, of course, in vague and uncertain ways. I recognise how immensely lucky that I am in many ways in this crisis, but still like everyone else I wonder what’s next. I seethe at the inept politics back home and the sprawling misinformation, ignorance and hate that’s taken over the internet. I saw friends back in the US, dealing first hand with the death of a neighbour or a relative or a patient and silently cursed all those who’d downplay this as some passing conspiracy fad.
There’s been a surplus of thinkpieces and essays out there imagining a better world to come, full of idealistic notions that I wish I could fully see coming true.
In the end I have to ignore everyone else’s freaking out and rage and tension and come back to what matters the most, the people I live with inside these overly familiar walls, and controlling the antic voices in my own head.
I stood on a beach today and looked at the sea. It’s still pretty good, eh?
Nik Dirga 