Miniature Worlds and Imagining Mind -- a mental health response to pandemic restrictions

Were you one of those millions of urban dwellers worldwide condemned to life in a box in a tower block, during the pandemic? Presumably millions in Europe -- Austria for a start -- still are. Did you resort to devices like this:

"Humans are designed by evolution for society, talk, interaction, for watching and mimicking others, criticizing, cajoling, encouraging, comforting in turn. Screen-life is no substitute; screen life is fake life. Depression stalks us now, tracking some folks down to their suicidal lairs. Or up to lethal tower block heights. How many, gazing out the tiny window, dream of jumping?

       “Only go out for essentials” say the health officials. Here's what's essential: fresh air, movement, sunshine, night skies and the smell of leaves. Zooming is not essential, Google News is not essential. These are distractions, traps and diversions and in the end, corrosive.
       On the table in the sitting room squashed up against the bedroom of my box, I have built a miniature world. There's a castle, and a farm, a farmhouse and some trees made of twigs gleaned from the municipal park across town. A family – dream characters – lives in the farmhouse. A queen lives in the castle, as do her ladies-in-waiting, and lots of knights, her visitors of the night. In my night-visiting dreams I imagine their dramas unfolding, and the farm animals stirring, the owls watching, the earth of the miniature-landscape seething with microscopic life.

       When the world shrinks we must make an inner world grow, the one we may reveal in miniature displays and the imagining mind. This is resilience … "

(See the whole article, "The Box and the Bubble", by Flora Jardine, at: 

https://pagespineficshowcase.com

Will the legacy of COVID be mental illness, or mental health?

We're constantly being warned that the pandemic and its lock-downs might have spread a secondary virus: mental illness. A contingent of the polled public reports an experience of depression. Are they depressed at having been locked-down, or at the threat of having to come back out? The media know that keeping the viewer engaged requires the right mixture of fear and hope. We hope for “building back better” and “finding the new normal” and “the light at the end of the tunnel” (if you hope for the end of cliches, forget it). Now, we're told also to fear the emotional wreckage the pandemic is said to be leaving behind.

Might it have left emotional gains, though? Maybe these feared mental illness syndromes are examples of adaptive strength, and one person's mental illness is another person's mental health.

Hoarding: we're hoarding new-found privacy and space – some folks won't throw those away with the great “re-opening”. We'll hang on to having time to think, time to ourselves.

Agoraphobia: we might wish to continue avoiding crowds, predatory huggers, the misery of public transport (which never was hygienic). We're like groundhogs who poke their noses out at the first hint of spring and then hustle back into their burrow if they don't like the look of things. What's so bad about hibernation?

Isolation: is this another word for self-regulating self-sufficiency? Embrace your inner hermit.

Obsessive compulsive disorder: if we practise orderliness and non-forgetfulness, is that bad? Asking yourself, is my mask in my pocket? Is my extra mask in my pocket? Have I turned off the lights and stove? (Since you've been working from home the electricity bill has soared. Who wouldn't check?)

Hand-washing: remember when that was the hallmark of OCD? Now it's a legal requirement.

Missing contact with relatives: come on -- you used to dread seeing half of them.

Walking in nature, being with pets, reading many books, doing yoga and crossword puzzles ... are such new habits unhealthy? Is habit itself obsessive and inhibiting? No: humans develop habits instinctively; if we resist one, another will take its place. So choose them wisely. If someone calls that obsessive, fine: obsess away.

One day we'll look back on the pandemic with nostalgia, like people look back at World War II with its shortages and its “making do” inventiveness, and being “all in it together”. We might look back nostalgically at all-staying-apart – with its possibilities for peace and privacy. In fact, for some people the whole thing has been a holiday from the stress of what we called ordinary life.

Maybe “opening up” at the end of COVID is what will drive us mad.

Peace and space

Grave Thoughts on the Levity of Life

From where I sit on a bench the seaside graveyard climbs a gentle hill. The graves, headstones, crosses, bouquets of flowers fresh or wilted, have a calming quality. The silence of underground folk makes them seem wiser than they were in life. They have acquired gravitas, of course. All of them, however wise or foolish they once were, took some sort of knowledge to the grave, took life experience. If you could gather all the knowledge and memory lying silent and hidden here – cryptic in the crypts – how bulky would your treasure trove be? How would we measure the weight of it? 

The birds are hushed and even the trees stand motionless for a windless moment. Wisdom gathers just out of reach, below ground, an existential state away. I chat with the dead.

I knew some of the people buried here, before they arrived at this final place. As a Memoirs Coach I helped them write their life stories. I did unofficial surveys of their beliefs (as I still do of their survivors' beliefs). What is the secret of your longevity, I would ask clients in their 90s? How do you stay young and active?

“Don't drive. I walk everywhere.”

“Exercise kills. Never run or do aerobics. I drive (or better yet, get driven) everywhere – I relax, I smell the roses.”

“Play bridge, it keeps the mind alive.”

“Never play bridge, it's an old folks game.”

Maybe it's a matter of diet, I wonder aloud when I'm chatting with these wise elders.

“It is indeed: eat protein. Lots of meat.”

“It is indeed: never eat meat! I'm a vegetarian.”

“Oils. Olive, sesame, coconut, grape-seed ... I'd be dead without oil.”

You'd be dead without food, I point out. It doesn't seem to matter which kind we eat.

“That's because we don't live by bread alone. (By the way, don't eat bread, carbohydrates kill.) Try prayer.”

“Meditation.”

“Friends and family.”

“Solitude.”

“Knowledge.”

“Innocence.”

“Duty.”

“Wealth.”

“Freedom from possessions.”

“Doing what's right.”

“Doing what you want.”

“Laughter.”

Yes, I reply, you're right.

Afterwards, my memoir clients drift off to their own lives and purposes, to solitude or family, bread or no-bread, walking, driving, roses, bridge ... leaving me none the wiser. Now I sit in the cemetery where the wise lie silent. So many purposes they too had, back then in Life.

Purpose itself keeps us getting up in the morning. I noticed that memoirists who had proclaimed purposes that made them unhappy were tense and tight. Those who were pleased with choices freely made seemed fortified, balanced, calm. Whoever is pleased is healthy. People with a sense of humour live on after death: I hear them chuckling down there below ground. There's levity inside those heavy coffins. Why not? Who said the afterlife would be rational?

I am pleased to sit in the sun in a park-like cemetery, viewing the natural world, living off-line. For this, my "platform" is my bench, from which I survey the beach and a bit of ocean to my left, and the grassy expanse of the graveyard to my right. Video sites (“I see” in Latin) in fact provide no vista. Cyber-life has no physicality, no flesh, no touch or scent. Virtual isn't real. 

The underground folk are real, and I hear their murmurs. Their city-state is stable, their country will last forever. They have time to be wise, now.

I turn to the seaside view on my left. A reviving breeze is coming off the ocean, its salty tang just noticeable up here on my bluff. The sea heaves gently. The life below the surface is as mysterious as that in the soil around the graves beside me. There are worms and micro-organisms in sea as in soil. The ocean floor crawls with them. Crustaceans hunt them. Fish slip through underwater forests of weed, nosing the swaying curtains apart in a silent search for food. Above, kelp forests bloom. A few otters and seals break the surface, calmly pursuing their otter-pleasures, seal-purposes, oblivious to us, our graves, lost loved ones, fears, plagues and sudden prohibitions. 

"Be Well" -- Or Be Unwell?

       "Be well" we sign our emails now, even in business messages to total strangers. But what does it mean? How do we "be well"? During the coronavirus epidemic it means don't get coronavirus, and the sub-text is "stay away from me". Go home. That's what the doctor ordered, and fear has made us obedient.
       But is it making us more well or less well? "Well" is one of those ancient monosyllables with a richly suggestive host of meanings. In English the word comes via Saxon from the Old German "welle", meaning wave. Health and good fortune well up like water in a well, or waves on the sea, or they sink like the water table in a drought.
       Famous wells such as those at Bath, Wells Cathedral, or Struell Wells in Ireland are fed by actual underground springs, and carry spiritual connotations. Religious structures like cathedrals are built on them. They illustrate the inseparability of the physical and the spiritual.     
          The COVID19 pandemic has licensed a hazardous flight from the physical. From the biological world we flee to cyber-space, and find that an easy, slack, undemanding and habit-forming place. We are rewarded for withdrawing indoors in front of computer screens, pretending that online networking is no different than meeting others in a cafe or lecture theatre. 

 Sedentary idleness too is an epidemic, and spreading ever-faster. Something is lost when scholars, knowledge seekers and philosophers don't communicate face-to-face. “Virtual” life is sterile life. We need body language, unconscious perception of hidden cues, the emotions below words, the expressions on faces. Our sensory-neural equipment evolved along with our need to be social, adept at sensing moods of those around us.

We also need cues from other species: the scents we pick up while forest-bathing, the pheromones of plants and animals, the sound of birds whose songs probably birthed human language. Did early feminid mothers not chirp at their infants, lulling them with the lilts of birdsong? In the fullness of time lullaby became verbal and words spun epic stories: religion, drama, literature were born.

       These could all but die in isolated cells where people merely watch computer screens. Poets made verse to the rhythm of walking, musicians created wind instruments with the living breath in their lungs: we've always tied creativity to physicality, we've never been robotic – until now. Now that we've created robots we've let them become the teachers. We follow them, instead of the peregrinating philosopher talking to the crowds in village after village. Maybe our future world ruler will be Top-Robot-Doctor, who welled up from the poisoned springs of digitalia. 

       There's no agora in the middle of town now; it's closed. No village green for the players to entertain us on, no spicy, sensuous and variegated Silk Trail, only the online retailer. Its delivery drones save us the trouble of going outside, getting up from the couch, being physical. It's not only our muscles that get flabby but also the parts of our brains that register muscular sensation, and the parts stimulated by smell, touch, vision and hearing.

Fearing that our bodies might catch a virus, we abandon bodies. We live without enchantment, a word related to “chant” and “cantare”, to sing. We don't sing and we don't recite; we merely speak to “Siri” and “Alexa” in their language: cybernetics. We have abandoned our inner animal, but our wild selves still keen and howl at night in dreams of lost physicality, dreams of longing.

The region of the brain supporting memory lies alongside the area devoted to smell. Leaves and flowers, humus-y soil and salty seas give off smell for a reason. They trigger communication among species, and they stimulate memory. Without physicality we become dumbed-down prematurely senile amnesiacs.                                       

Solitude too deepens life and mind, and hibernation provides rest, but immersion in online chatter is not real solitude, and the point of hibernation is to wake up refreshed. Let's not consent therefore to the theft of sensation and the freedom to roam, for physicality is our robust core (“robustus” -- strength). Without strength you cannot fight any virus. So let's call up our physical being, out of doors. That's what “be well” means.

  Stay strong - let nature be your guide

Health Officer Recommends --To escape Covid-19 AVOID DIGITAL DEVICES

Ha! Scared you, didn't I? Although the virus does indeed land on surfaces like keyboards and smartphones, they aren't telling us to "stay away from crowded websites" yet, or "maintain distance from computers".
What would life be like if they did, if "computer virus" became a biological as well as a digital thing?
What if the Chief Medical Officer told everyone "YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM YOUR COMPUTER BEFORE IT KILLS YOU"? Imagine the panic then - and the wailing about the economy.
Maybe we'd spend more time outdoors, enjoying nature and fresh air, and less hunched over our digital devices. That would be healthier indeed.
Maybe, without email, we'd communicate with hand-written notes, dropping them into each others' mail slots like characters were forever doing in Victorian novels.
We could have message boards in every community -- physical ones that is, on suitable walls.
We could escape the group-herding of Facebook, the mindless trash-talk of Twitter, the surveillance of Google.
This is looking better by the minute. Maybe we'd learn to remember things again, instead of just Googling them. We'd keep mind and memory in our brains instead of out-sourcing them.
We'd avoid the prison camp of Smart Cities like the one Google-Alphabet is planning for Toronto's Waterfront district -- a prison worse than any hospital, one where it's civil rights that are on life-support.
We would no longer be stalked by our devices which track us around cities and stores, reporting our movements to police and advertisers alike.
Maybe the old-fashioned Soap Box Orator would come back to the parks and squares -- anyone with ideas to share would stand up and speak, keeping free speech alive in the "agora". (Stand at the edge of the crowd to listen, if you insist on avoiding physical contact -- at least you could get to see the faces of other regulars. Actual facial recognition!)
Being outside so much we could watch birds coming and going, and the colours of trees changing, and at night notice the movement of moon and stars.
I don't know about everyone else but I'm feeling healthier already! I do get the irony of what I'm saying though: I'm telling you online how great it would be if we all went offline. So far it's but a health-work-in-progress. But thanks for the possibility, "corona" virus: if only you really did crown our lives with this silver lining.


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