Lessons of Lockdown

I'm not sure that I am an enormous fan of learning from experience. Experience has a tendency to be painful. Given the chance, I might have prefered to be born wise, or perhaps learn everything I need to from books - certainly that was the strategy I went for for at least the first couple of decades after I was taught to read. Why does trial and error have to involve error? Why can't it just be trial and success? Nevertheless, here we are, more than three months into lockdown, and I have to admit that I have learned a few things, despite my every effort not to.  For example, it's not that I was utterly unaware of this, but the past few months have shown me how completely, ridiculously and almost arbitrarily varied my moods are. The events of the days are close to identical, but some days I am a zombie, other days I am a bouncing bean. Why? I have no idea. Presumably some combination of hormones, weather, sleep, what I've eaten, subconcious cues from my enviroment... And yet somewhere early in life I picked up the message that I am supposed to be more or less the same every day: cheerful, hard working, calm yet energised. The person you keep being told to be at school, basically. And so I try to impose that mode of being on myself every single day, aside from weekends, where I suddenly expect myself to be ready to relax. Anyway, there were days last week when I could barely drag myself out of bed, and now here we are, Sunday, and I am bouncing off the walls. I have had an insanely productive weekend. Yesterday I made a will, for crying out loud. How much of your admin list would you have to get through to get to the point where you'd think, you know what? It's 6pm on a Saturday. I'm going to write a will. It's not entirely unlinked to being in the middle of a deadly pandemic of course. It's also not entirely unlinked to having watched everything on Netflix and Amazon Prime, twice. What I have really learned is that I usually spend a huge amount of my energy trying to regulate my mood into this cheerful, hard working, calm yet energised self, something I constantly calibrate through activities that pick up up or slow me down, and in the absence of many of these activities, all hell has broken loose. So now I am considering a new approach, which is to see if I should be active when I want to active and a zombie when I feel like a zombie. Is it possible that this approach will be better? Is it possible that school was wrong?  Another thing I've learned: some things are really good to do online. Others are not. Shopping for a bicycle online and online dating are disappointing in the exact same way. You can look at all the pictures and descriptions that you want but until you go for a ride you have no idea what you are getting. Zoom, we can all agree, is a necessary nightmare, useful for when you want to gather a large number of people together but infinitely inferior to a one to one phone call if you want to have a genuine conversation with someone, which itself pales into insignificance in comparison to actually being in the presence of another human. Online yoga on the other hand is an absolute dream. For twenty years I thought I hated yoga, but it turns out that I don't: I just hate yoga classes. Yoga classes are far too long, and they are full of other people doing yoga. Once I have gone to the yoga school, taken the class, and gone home again, that's two hours of my life devoted to hating myself for being less flexible than younger bendier people in better leggings, when I can spend a speedy half an hour in the privacy of my own bedroom stretching to Yoga with Adriene with no knowledge whatsoever as to whether nobody in the world can do a side plank other than Adriene and her dog or if I am the lone pathetic failure.  Films and television seem to work on any size of screen. You can have a decent experience watching even an epic like Dunkirk on a phone. It's designed to be seen on a screen, and your brain just adapts to the scale. Theatre is somehow insufferable on a small screen and gets more enjoyable as the screen gets bigger, which could make a certain amount of sense - you are used to seeing the actors life size - except that in real life I am often sitting at the back of the theatre and the stage is the size of a postage stamp. My theory, for what it's worth? The acting style on stage is larger than life in order to fill the theatre space, and seeing it reduced to smaller than life on a screen is weirdly embarassing, like someone doing baby talk to an adult. As for the back-of-the-theatre element, that doesn't matter because the space around you is big even if the actors look small in the distance, and also because you are familiar with the laws of perspective. 

Storytelling, I am reluctantly coming to accept, is pretty much unbearable online, both as a performer and as an audience member. It is to live storytelling what an answerphone message is to having a conversation. Yes, the storyteller is talking to you, in a way, but any sense of intimacy or direct communication - which is really the whole purpose of storytelling - is lost. It's strange again because it seems like it should be analogous to a theatre performance or perhaps even to a story written down. But the former always has an element of being behind a fourth wall, so we're used to not being addressed directly, and the latter is a solitary activity that takes place through some alchemy of shapes on a page or screen and takes form in the reader's solitary imagination. To have someone looking at you but not seeing you, talking to you but not knowing that you're there, or to be that person, trying to create a connection with the audience but just speaking to your own image on a screen, can be a miserably uncomfortable experience. Although please forget I said that next time I try to convince you to show up for some online storytelling that I am doing. In the face of this awful relentless NOTHING, I am still trying to figure out how to turn online storytelling into something more truly enjoyable. Would adding images help? Animation? Music?  One last thing that has become clear to me is that we like to be with people when we want to be with people and we like to be alone when we want to be alone. Lockdown has pretty much robbed us of this in both directions, having nowhere to go when the need for solitude strikes (commiserations for anyone hoping to have a quiet day on a Dorset beach last week), and no comfortable way of being with others should the need for companionship arise on a rainy day. Screens and smartphones intrude either way, keeping us tethered to the world when we'd rather let go, or providing ersatz forms of connection when only the presence of another person would really satisfy. But in the end we do our best with what we've got. Because if this situation has taught me anything at all, it's that I have a lot less control over the world than I thought I did, so I just need to surrender to reality right now. And that's something I hope to remember as lockdown slowly continues to open up.