The Side-Eye on keeping moving

The last few months have been a time for cleaving to all that is comfortable and comforting: mainlining mashed potato, Mint Viscounts and the novels of Elizabeth Jane Howard in my case. When the future is unknown and the present is downright terrifying, our thoughts turn naturally to the familiar. You know where you are with a path that is already well-trodden. When the world is going haywire, the last thing you require is any further shaking up.

But as we emerge from our post corona cocoons and caves, let’s not ignore the insistent green shoots of change and difference that are more evident every day. It’s easy to default to the mindset that life that we know it stopped back in February and no future picture can live up to those halcyon days. And it’s important to grieve; to acknowledge bereavement and loss, the financial worries and uncertainty that no rainy day fund could have anticipated. Yet it’s also crucial that as we pick ourselves up and face into the new reality that we determinedly seek out reasons to be cheerful. Life as it was is not coming back but our new lives can be rich and fulfilling too.

For those that have jobs to return to, perhaps the drudgery of the daily commute will become a thing of the past. The prospect of a mere two days a week (apparently the likely ‘new normal’ in the new world of work) in an office, with adults is transformed into a beguiling proposition without any snack-making duties. With more time working away from HQ, living within commutable distance is no longer necessary. If you’ve ever fancied living on a smallholding, closer to your Mammy or at the top of a hill, then as long as you’ve got decent wifi, why not? Overnight, the incremental, blood-from-a-stone flexible working dream has hurtled a lot closer.

As someone who (historically) liked nothing more than a mooch around the shops, the impossibility of mooching recently has been a revelation. I’m not going to pretend that sometimes ‘shopping in my wardrobe’ has felt just too hairshirt-y but it turns out that instead of losing the run of myself in Zara, what I’ve missed most are the small, local shops where they know my name and keep things aside that I might like. Shopping local, buying only what we need – these feel like habits that are here to stay, along with my daily flailing attempts at yoga.

The kids no longer scream blue murder when ‘a walk and a picnic’ is what we do between 12 and 2pm daily. The picnic is a bare bones thing of sandwich-and-an-apple and the walk varies between the ‘field one’ and the ‘sea one’, but we’ve started to pass knowing comment on the sort of details that our busy eyes never noticed before. The seal family’s preferred location, seed heads, the gory decomposition of a fox – these are our specialist subjects now. There’s plenty of screen time, but not all of it spent on inane TikToks. Worlds are built, races are won, friendships are maintained and a lot of fart jokes are shared. We can do this, I think.

We can do this, I know we can, but then a city explodes and I can’t get the scene out of my head. A longed-for trip abroad becomes impossible with a new quarantine requirement. A friend’s husband goes to the ICU and she doesn’t reply to my messages any more. We can do this, but it’s hard. But we can’t go back. We can only go forward, the way humans have always done, clinging to the green shoots and small pleasures and little wins. Onwards.

Jennifer Coyle, August 2020.