Reset Button

Around the kitchen table.

Like many of you, I suppose, I can see my thought patterns revolving around different Covid-19-related topics these days, circling around the same ideas again and again in ever-tighter spirals.

When the full weight of this crisis hit me about four weeks ago - that is, when I realized that there was no going on as if nothing had happened, that it was more than a major inconvenience causing events to be cancelled – my priorities began to shift drastically in my mind. I started wondering what was actually important and relevant to me. I asked myself two big questions: with whom do I want to be during these times, and where? The answer was clear and immediate: with my partner (who happens to live in a different city), and somewhere closer to nature than my flat in Berlin. So I packed a couple of things into a large bag, most importantly my watercolours, paper, notebooks, laptop, inks and pens and brushes, and left for a little while.

 So many people, like most of my acquaintances in Berlin, live alone. My thoughts have been circling back to loneliness a lot, lately, and the significance of human connectivity in our lives, especially in times of insecurity, distress and social distancing. My heart goes out to those who have no-one to talk to.

 As I grow older, I can see my stubborn independence, my lone-wolfiness and one-woman-show-ness becoming increasingly less important, with relationships and symbiotic systems with others gaining significance. Just a couple of years ago I would have raged against this thought, would have thought it a matter of personal pride to prove that I can make a life for myself alone, with help from no-one. I suppose I was pretty lonely at times in my life, in my years at Stellenbosch while I was studying and later, when I moved to Berlin. I really thought I was happy then, I liked the anonymity and autonomy of doing what I wanted when I wanted to. I had meaningful friendships and romantic relationships, of course, but looking back, I think I was still lonely in those relationships.

Now I feel priorities shifting like tectonic plates in my soul. I can sense the experience of the past two weeks leaving some profound mark: As I am experiencing the opposite of loneliness, living in quasi-quarantine with three other beautiful souls in fairly close quarters, one of whom is my partner, we are slowly becoming fused into an interdependent human ecosystem. Because these are challenging times, we are forced to be quite vulnerable with each other, more transparent with our fears and weaknesses than we might have been in different circumstances. It’s a moment where our respective weirdness and strange coping mechanisms become fused into one of those excruciatingly beautiful instants of true humanness. This feels real, and raw, and present.

 It’s a moment in our lives where we are granted the opportunity of long conversations, where we are allowed to hold each other’s emotions, to listen, to be forgiving with ourselves, to share our fears, to laugh until our ribs hurt, be serious and severe, or make terrible jokes and play games. There is no rush. Things have to be done, but not now. None of us can predict if and how our skills will be relevant in the future, and how we will go about forging a career path after this crisis.

There is a lot of talk around the dinner table about the future. About a resetting of values. Since we are all in the creative sector, our dreams ping-ponging across the table are focussed on finding new systems to present our work to the public, new interdisciplinary ways of making meaning. We are moving into the most serious recession of our young lives yet, right at the beginning of our careers. It will force all of us to have less, need less, want less, travel less, do less. Having many fancy things will become quite uncool; having read books and learned “useless” skills, however, rather trendy. Creativity will matter, spontaneity and the ability to improvise; humour and poetry and deep knowledge and the capacity for empathy.

 Each night, as I fall asleep, I ask myself how we can emphasize the importance of storytelling, how we can reach people emotionally, create mirrors of our souls and those of others in our art, how we can add value to everyday life, and re-invent an age where things matter again and human time and manual labour are cherished above everything else.