When each of my sons were born, I welcomed them to
their home planet by tearfully reciting a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, from a chapter in which the titular character
suggested that all newborns should be given the following advice:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — Goddamn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
It’s a quote that I think about a lot. At times of great joy, as with my boys. At times of great sorrow, as with the Christchurch massacre. And it’s in my head right now: that in this time of enormous struggle and uncertainty, when everything seems frightening and bleak, one thing remains unchanged: Goddamn it, we’ve got to be kind.
And I say that because, friends, you’re almost
certainly feeling scared and anxious. And you know what? You are one hundred
per cent correct to feel that way.
No one
knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, much less in a week, or a
fortnight, or three months. Maybe we’ll be all back to normal in May and
be laughing about that weird period we all had to stay home for a bit. Or maybe
things will never go back to the way they were.
If it’s the latter then history suggests that
whatever we have after this will be better than what came before, so that’s
something – but in the meantime, you need to focus on yourself and the people
around you. And that’s more than enough to be getting on with.
And for once, everyone is in the same boat in these
uncharted waters. We all worry about our parents, our friends, our neighbours,
our colleagues. Kindness is hard in these situations, especially if we’re
picking through empty supermarket shelves or scrolling through our
anxiety-ridden socials. There are plenty of unanswered questions and no recent
precedents to draw from.
I’ll tell
you this, though: worrying about the stuff you can’t know right now isn’t
going to make this easier for you, or for those around you. And by “you”
I mean “me”,
because I am by nature a chronic over-thinker and right now I need to learn to
calm the hell down. And I know I’m not alone.
And much as I don’t want to tell you what to
do, I know that staying sane and functional is an ongoing effort (cheers for
that lesson, chronic depression!) and that a forced hiatus to normal life might
as well be taken as a welcome chance for some indulgent time out, especially
when the alternative is blind panic.
That said, I’m not going to tell you what to
do, although I know that working through my to-read pile and another leisurely
play through 100-odd hours of Red Dead Redemption 2 feels like some
excellent self-care options right now.
For the sake of our families, especially our children,
we have to do everything we can to make sure the time in isolation is
remembered as that cool at-home-holiday where we did stuff together. We have to
make an effort to use the glorious technology at our disposal – stuff the
people sheltering from the 1918 flu would have been very glad to have – to
ensure that we check in on each other.
This is a crisis which is engulfing the world. We need
cool heads to deal with the immediate medical and logistical challenges, and we
need our leaders to act with all the compassion and kindness they can in
navigating the next few months. And you and I need to be kind: to ourselves, to
the people around us, and to all the other people going through this. Which is
everyone.
This too will pass, and the way that we deploy our kindness and our compassion and our care will help ensure that as many of us pass through it as healthy and sane as possible.
Goddamn it, South Australia: we’ve got to be kind.
Andrew P Street is a freelance writer whose books include The Short And Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign Of Captain Abbott (2015) and The Long And Winding Way To The Top (2017).
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