Birthdays in pandemic time
Lower Peirce Reservoir, one of many lockdown breathers
Birthdays, I’ve discovered, can be strange in a pandemic – whether because time seems to have slowed altogether, or because other upheavals put our more ‘ordinary’ celebrations into perspective.
Last year, a call came through from two fellow volunteers around 1 a.m., to say that our mutual friend (a migrant brother) was having a sudden onset of fever and chest pains in quarantine. We woke our colleagues to get him the medical attention he needed, and eventually sent him to hospital via ambulance in the wee hours of my birthday. This year’s was, happily(!), less dramatic: I turned 27 over the weekend on Google Meet, with a bunch of friends who stayed to chat after a round of Zoom trivia.
Given that we were all familiar with community work in some way, it wasn’t surprising that talk turned, around midnight, to social change. Or more accurately, to the question of whether our attempts to seek change had made us more (or less) certain that it was possible. A couple of us felt that, while our respective convictions about a fairer society still held, our experiences had shaped how we thought these would one day be achieved. We also confessed to a nagging sense that in some areas, at least, the odds seemed impossibly great. Could the injustices we saw ever be reversed? And if not, then how far should our work ‘accept’ – or reflect – that inevitability?
I’d be quick to say that, rather than ‘jadedness’, the tenor of the conversation was one of care and hope. Deep down, we worried that seeking change on behalf of others that we knew was unlikely could, in its own way, be unfair. Instinctively, we also saw that it wasn’t our place to define change for the communities we worked with. After all, even if our privilege allowed us to articulate possibilities quite different from their aspirations, hope was nothing if it didn’t come hand-in-hand with agency.
But reflecting on our conversation the next morning, I found myself wondering if the pandemic hadn’t cast its own unspoken shadow across it, tinting our late-night musings (and indeed, so many other discussions over the past months) with a heightened sense of the inevitable. Since COVID-19 upended plans and routines a year ago, many have written about the pervasive sense of helplessness brought on by the sheer weight of circumstances beyond our control. Notwithstanding moments of active solidarity (like this one), the virus and its evolving effects – if only by being impossible to plan for – will have brought even optimists to despair. Collectively, we’ve found ourselves on the back foot. Individually, we’ve been drained, and swamped.
It’s no wonder, then, that we (subconsciously, perhaps?) might be more prone to seeing some outcomes as pre-ordained today, than a year or two ago. This could be a helpful reality check, as we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of changing aspects of the status quo. Yet neither should we over-correct our field of vision. If anything, we should factor a ‘pandemic discount’ into the hopelessness we might be tempted to feel about other eventualities, knowing that some of that resignation is the pandemic at work, making us think things are less changeable than they really are.
All this is to say, yes, I suppose getting older has a way of making us more circumspect about our convictions, more aware of their ‘trade-offs’ and less quick to impose them on others. A way, too, of clarifying what lies within our power to change (“that which we are, we are”), and helping us see where despair comes from. But there’s no reason for these to stand in the way of hope. As ever: “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”*
* It’s become a bit of a ritual for me to return to this poem each birthday; I find something new each time, and I hope you will too! (Side note: on seeking newer worlds).
** Apologies if this post was a little bit more rambly than usual. You’ll forgive me: I’m in my late twenties now…