No surprise: The latest coronavirus lockdowns have been harder to deal with than the early ones, and psychologist from the UK to the US report that people are showing more signs of sustained stress than during the first wave of lockdowns, almost a year ago to the day. “The new COVID-19 variant is spreading fast,” an electric sign warns a passing jogger in London. “If you go out, you can spread it. People will die.”
Alarmist or not, most people are following the rules. That doesn’t make it any easier, though. Stress has a way of seeping into one’s core being, unless one thinks of ways to combat it.
There are ways to cope.
And one way is to look for good in the environment. Terry Waite, an author and humanitarian who was held hostage for four years in Lebanon — while trying to negotiate a hostage release himself, ironically enough — told the Guardian newspaper this past weekend that his life changed dramatically after he was released from captivity. He had believed his time in captivity had been a waste of time, but he later realized it had not. Even though he was deprived of books, newspapers and natural light during his five years in solitary confinement, he wrote his first book in his head. “I was discovering creative abilities that I did not know I had,” he told the Guardian. “This current situation” — the Covid lockdowns — “may seem a waste of time but is not if you can draw on it at a later stage.”
Sheltering-in-place over a long period of time can cause one to become introspective. Introspection often causes us to peer inside both sides of our personality, the light and the dark. If one dwells too much on the negative side, one can fall into a deep depression, Waite noted.
The key, Waite found, is to find a degree of inner harmony between the two sides that we all have.
Nature, wildlife and conservation photographers, for example, ordinarily used to travelling long distances to some of the world’s most pristine and remote wilderness areas, have adapted to shelter-at-home rules by poring through old images, many of them forgotten, taken years or even decades earlier. New advances in apps and restoration technology means many images, cast aside and assumed to be lacking in some way, can be rescued, as if new.
Wildlife photographers often say they can never find the time to properly edit their work — one notable, world-changing image can represent thousands of frames that never saw the light of day — and the ongoing lockdowns have freed up that time.
Poring over forgotten images from past travels is a way of reliving the original experience, too. I’ve done it myself.
It’s strange. Editing images from expeditions dating as far back as 10-20 years ago can make it seem as if it happened only yesterday.
“I’ve made a point of going out walking every day and resetting my expectations of what I’m likely to experience,” My Life as a Hermit author Neil Ansell told the Guardian this past weekend. “I have refocused my attention on the smaller things — wildflowers and butterflies and fungi, learning as I go.
“I believe a lot of people have found that a locked-down life has given them a much greater appreciation of the natural world.”
Truth.