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Who will you be when the masks come off?

What will you do differently when the hand sanitiser is put away and we can hold each other as close and tight as we want to?

Six months ago, COVID-19 came along. Under a microscope, it looked like a red wedding bouquet but coronavirus turned our little lives inside out. Our mortality and vulnerability were suddenly obvious. Touch and proximity disappeared. Industries and their jobs vanished.

And we were all told to stay home. No school or office. Commutes disappeared, so did most weeknight obligations. No visiting family or friends. No swimming lessons or yoga practice. No movie nights or catch-up coffees. No park play-dates. No live music or after show eats. No leg waxing or window shopping. No street vendors. No travel. No hugs and kisses.

As I pined for connection with family and friends, I also realised how much I needed to get outside. I craved nature, greenery, ocean air, any contact with the world other than the four walls I lived in. We took walks, discovered new pockets of our area and talked to neighbours we didn’t know.

The weekends stretched out to become almost spacious. I had time to walk to the pace of my two-year old and was sad to realise that I usually tugged him along. And how nice was it to see the parks with people in them and families riding their bikes together?

With all the white noise of normal life muted, there was more time to think -not about the bigger picture of globalisation or economic models, but on a personal level about what really matters. I certainly won’t take touch and its connection for granted. I’d like community and kindness to be a bigger part of my life. I’d like to keep the pace in step with my kids and have time to cook and play and walk as a family.

When the world went on hold, my to-do list shrunk and I was liberated from all the other mental ‘stuff’ that constantly hovers on my periphery. Now the restrictions are being eased and I hope that I can hold onto some of my lockdown lessons. 

It’s human instinct to reassess when your life has been interrupted in such a dramatic way. What will you jettison and what will you keep when the masks come off?

Keep your notebook close in a crisis

The simple trinity of a pen, a person and some paper has provided solace for many before us.

We’re in uncharted territory here. Most of us haven’t lived through a pandemic. None of us have lived through one of these proportions. When we write, we can use our words as an antidote to anxiety, as freedom from our confinement and to simply mark that we were here.

Writing during a time of crisis is not a new idea. Keeping a journal as a way to manage anxiety and depression was instinctive for writers like Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. Both of them used diaries to detail their internal struggles.

There’s a relief in the simplicity of writing a journal. It’s just you and your thoughts without the echo of comments or threads. But it’s also a ritual that can ease your anxiety and give you a chance to reflect. When there are so many things outside our control, routine and habit can help to calm that anxiety.

There is also a sense of ‘better out than in’. The brain dump, brain vomit or ‘morning pages’ from Julia Cameron’s the Artists Way all acknowledge the idea that if you articulate it on a page, it’s less likely to rattle around in your head.

The days can be long and lonely during lockdown. Journaling can give you an outlet for your feelings, providing an internal audience when no one else is there. It also offers a sense of escape from isolation. 

Scottish poet, William Soutar wrote his book, Diary of a Dying Man, when he was quarantined with pneumonia. He spoke of his diary as a true companion and friend. American writer Flannery O’Connor also wrote a lot of her close observations about life as an escape from her sickbed.

Thomas Mallon in A Book of One’s Own: People and their Diaries, said that some people have kept a journal “not so much to record lives as to create them, their diaries being the only world in which they could fully live.” This is true for Xavier de Maistre. In 1794, he wrote A Journey Round my Room. It was written while he was under house arrest after deciding to explore his room and record it as a travel journal.

People journal against anxiety and isolation but you can also write to simply record. You can write for posterity like Samuel Pepys, the grandfather of modern diary entries. He just wrote it how it was.

Pepys covered the quotidian highs and lows of 17th Century England. He also covered the Great Plague of London. As a wealthy man, his experiences weren’t at the frontline but his observations of daily life give us insight into that time. He tells us that he chews tobacco to protect against infection and about his suspicions that the hair from corpses is being used by wig-makers. 

Restrictions feel normal now but they aren’t and this time is going to be interesting to future generations. Curators are already collecting proof of life as we’re living it now. In recovery people often write to addictions or perpetrators. In a pandemic, write to whoever or whatever you need to. Write to your unborn children and grandchildren. They’re going to want to hear about it. Or write to your future self, because we’ll all be different by the end of this.

This is a unique moment in time and our individual experiences of it will create the history of the future. Your notes from the pandemic could enter the Corona-lit canon that is no doubt going to emerge when the masks come off. They’re certainly going to help you survive the anxiety and isolation of life lived within four walls.

Valé Mary Oliver

The late American poet Mary Oliver blocked out life’s white noise and tuned in to our natural world.

The American poet Mary Oliver died nearly a year and a half ago and I’ve just found out. Somehow that adds to the loss.

For anyone who thinks (some) poetry is too hard (and I’ll gingerly raise my hand), read Mary Oliver. There are no tricks and turns for the sake of it.

One of her great gifts, was to take a moment in time and hush the rest of the world so we could kneel down with her and take a really close look. Her words magnify the natural world and return it golden and holy.

She had such reverence for life and her passionate questions have become mantras to many. 

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

These words from her poem Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches? were written on a post-it and stuck above our kitchen sink until it would stick no longer. Then I moved it to my desk, this pink post-it,  water-stained and sun-faded with a message too vital for the recycling bin.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

In The Summer Day she calls us to action again. How can we fumble through our days on repeat when life is in session?

Whenever the world is turned up too high or there’s too much interference, reading Mary Oliver mutes all the chatter. It’s quiet, suspended there in her poetry, watching birds arc in the sky, noticing mushrooms on the forest floor or the trees as theylean in and sigh together.

Her North American environment is completely alien to me. We have bushland and heat and seasons that aren’t so neatly marshalled. But what she showed us was universal. Moments. Wonder. Reverence for silence and nature. I think we can all understand that.

Thank you, Mary, for trusting your words to us.

Shakespeare, me and an unchanged signature

Anyone else still using the loopy mess they invented when they were 10?

Apparently when Shakespeare was bored he would practise signatures over and over to decide which one he liked the best. When I was ten I, like Shakespeare, was bored and decided it was time to invent my signature.

A signature was such an adult gesture. I wanted to emulate the sophisticated copperplate loops I’d seen. However, my cohort at school didn’t learn copperplate handwriting. Our cursive was called ‘foundation’ handwriting and it was really just print tenuously held together by little curls from one letter to the next. There was nothing romantic or slanted. Foundation handwriting was all function and no flourish.

There are a few decisions to be made when you create a signature. Do you use your full name, initials or an initial and a surname? I decided on a very loopy N Cullen. I was proud that the N was surrounded by the C of my surname. It seemed like a clever touch. And, yes, it’s as bubbly and tween as it sounds. It’s lucky I didn’t use Nina, because there’d probably still be a heart over the i. This was supposed to be my understudy signature while I perfected some neat and impressive cursive squiggle worthy of the important documents it would one day grace.

Then I started signing things; a kids’ bank account, a passport, birthday cards. 10 years later when I wanted to dissociate myself from this loopy embarrassment, I’d signed too many things. I had a driver’s licence and a bank card. Every official document that’d been pushed under my pen had the same signature.

I never sat down again to nut out my signature and create something with a bit more dignity. Luckily, signatures don’t matter now as much as they used to. Cheques barely exist and I don’t even think you sign the back of your credit card anymore. Legal and medical documents still need you to make your personal mark but I’ve made peace with my squiggles now. It makes me look young.