HOPE

(def: wanting something to happen or to be true, and usually having a good reason to think that it might)

Since this whole crisis started, I’ve kept wondering whether I’m ready yet to talk, or even think, about hope. In those first weeks, it seemed all too early. Some out there were identifying silver linings, like the fake news that there were dolphins in the canals of Venice, or that – and this was true – pollution had almost melted away over China, or even that we could hear the birdsong better. But it felt to me we were too early in the grief cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. There’s a hope that is about not accepting what has happened, or its true gravity. I wanted to resist that false hope.

Still, it’s Easter and now I’m listening to the blackbirds singing – in the dead of night – and thinking about hope. For in the tiny moments when I can step back from my fear for myself and loved ones, hope is what I find myself looking for. It’s all too easy to gaze out and see only the story that ends badly, the oncoming economic depression in which the poor are made poorer and the rich hold on to their wealth and health, or the segueing of disasters, one into another, in which our children find themselves lurching from pandemic to climate crisis. Many of us are finding that our thoughts are in a very black place. The nights can be long and wakeful.

So we do need to foster hope – and that’s an active process. You have to work at it. You have to plant seeds. You have to water them. Hope doesn’t really last without doing anything. It doesn’t survive long as just an idea in your head. It’s all about finding those grains of something you can work with. And they exist – it’s just they seem more difficult to access, more virtual, in an era when we are being told to stay at home. Even the reaching out we’re doing across the internet is a start. Even our clapping for the NHS provokes hope that we can come together and create a society in which our carers are valued.

Many people are already looking for new roles – what they can do, not only to help others now, but perhaps as part of some human movement towards creating a better society, somewhere at the almost unimaginable end of all this. We’ve signed up for things. We’ve helped neighbours out. We’ve felt inadequate, and worried we have nothing to offer. We’re still trying to work out if, and how, the things we used to value and fight for matter in this new universe. Many of them still do. What we always used to hope for – a fairer world, a new relationship with the environment, an end to homelessness – seems all the more important now, even if our immediate concern is the virus threat. As Rebecca Solnit wrote this week: “One of our main tasks now – especially those of us who are not sick, are not frontline workers, and are not dealing with other economic or housing difficulties – is to understand this moment, what it might require of us, and what it might make possible.”

These problems – how to reinvent our economic system, how to change our physical impact on the planet or how to rejuvenate mental health – are issues people have been proposing solutions to for some time. There are blackbirds out there that have almost been waiting for this moment to arise. It may seem crazy to hope that this crisis could be what propels these ideas into action, but one thing about the dramatic change we are experiencing is that it does make other change feel more possible. We now see, for instance, that we don’t have to constantly travel around trailing emissions. People can stop flying. Homeless people can be put into empty Airbnb flats. The British state can reinvent itself at startling speed. The virus has brought many terrifying changes with it – but some of the changes it has brought are in themselves, hope. I’ll water that.

TWITCHY

(def: on the look out for someone else breaking the coronavirus rules)

The curtains are twitching. The smartphones are twitching too, every time someone sees someone out in the park, not quite keeping the two-metre rule, even though they may be a group that lived crammed together in a small flat with zero outdoor space. We have become, almost overnight, a nation of twitchers and shamers. That’s understandable.

But let’s cut each other some slack. Let’s not take this whole thing a twitch too far.