When This Is All Over…

WFH — working from home.

Quarantine. Social distancing.

‘You need to turn the Mute button off.’

Certain words and phrases crop up more often in this uncertain era but the one I notice the most is this: ‘When This Is All Over…’

It heralds someone describing a change they’re going to make in their life. It might be as simple as hugging a loved one or remembering to notice the birdsong or the blue sky. With the kids home all day, it might be a new appreciation for teachers.

It was Samuel Johnson in the C18th who coined the slightly brutal phrase that ‘hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind’.

Now we all find ourselves living in a global near-death experience. Astonished at mortality rates, we shudder at how close death comes, how fragile our days.

We throw our imaginations forward to when this is all over and find ourselves with a deeper appreciation for things we’d taken for granted.

For instance on Thursday night when standing on your own doorstep became a deeply religious moment.

People banging saucepans, cheering and clapping solidarity for the care-givers and life-savers in our NHS. I stood in the darkness on our street and marvelled as people leaned out of windows and porches — breaking their isolation for a brief celebration.

When this is all over perhaps we’ll understand that our individual health is bound up in the health of everyone else.

It was a moment of public ritual like those in November when we keep a minute’s silence to remember those who lost their lives in conflict.

It felt religious because the word ‘religion’ is rooted in the latin word to bind or to connect.

We are bound together and re- ligare — from which comes re-ligion — is about reconnection.

When this is all over maybe we’ll reconnect with each other.

When we walk, as today, in the valley of the shadow of death, we’re overcome with a sense of nostalgia for the future.

A version of the past we now understand we would quite like to have lived. A version we commit to if we’re given the days.

When this is all over perhaps we’ll lose the fake luxury of feeling we’re independent agents in charge of our own destiny.

Perhaps we’ll see that love for our neighbours in this world must be as indiscriminate as a virus.

The writer Barbara Brown Taylor coined the word endarkenment — as opposed to enlightenment — to describe how a time of uncertainty, when we lose our bearings and sense of the normal, can be midwife to clarity and revelation. One mediaeval Christian mystic talked of ‘the cloud of unknowing’.

When this is all over we should not want to go back to normal because normal was already not working, for most people in the world, most of the time.

When this is all over I vow to hug my loved ones, to notice the blue sky, to cherish those who care for others… and to live my life as if it is bound up with every life.

For today, maybe I’ll keep my distance and ring my mum.

(The text of ‘Thought For The Day’ delivered on BBC Radio 4 on March 28th.)