I’m at the stage of lockdown that I’m cleaning out my spice drawer and rearranging my bookshelves.
I could be reading. I could be writing. I could be watching something on my laptop. I could be sorting my emails. There are a thousand things I could be doing.
This is displacement activity. Mundane activities that require little thought but do require at least some degree of concentration. I’m trying to find the delicate balance between thinking too much and thinking too little. Either raises my stress level.
It’s not boredom as such. Perhaps some minor existential crisis about the meaning of living in these strange times. I’ve spoken to noone all day. Indeed, I can spend days in that state. No longer do I regularly pop into my local supermarket, or local library, and shoot the breeze discussing random shit, or ask someone about their kids, grandkids, what their weekend has been like, what they got up to.
Instead the patten of the days remain roughly the same. There’s very little to distinguish one from the other except for the occasional video chat discussing projects and the like. A phone call with a friend or two.
I’m changing where I walk a little, skipping many of the parks on weekends. They are a little too anxiety inducing. So I walked up and down a few hills, visited the Horniman Museum, the local woods. A good walk. Another quiet day.
And perhaps some sense of what the next steps will be. Over the next week, government will release their plan on how the country may gradually ease lockdown. It will be interesting to see if there’s any shift towards quarantine for people coming into the country from other countries where numbers are high. Many other countries are doing it.
I no longer watch the daily briefings in full. Today though, another 315 people have died bringing the total to 28,466.
So that’s it for Day 41. Stay safe, stay well, and stay home!