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"These
past weeks were the unaccustomed quietness of pubs shuttered,
restaurants stilled, railway stations and airports emptied, and
all of us, the living and the waking, wondering what all this
meant or could mean, and – often more insistently - when it was
going to end.
"Simultaneously,
if we knew people who had fallen ill, we worried about them,
prayed for them, and did all we could to ensure that they wouldn’t
leave us just yet: not leave like that. Not so suddenly, so
intubated. Not whilst gasping for breath behind some sterile
partition, sequestered in a fluorescent-lit hospital ward. Not
like that, without our hands to hold and our face to stroke, as
we in turn wanted to hold and comfort them. Through it all, as we
thought of them and seasonal gifts like the sorely missed
brighter-than-bright Birmingham Christmas market, there was
always the cloaking dusk, and then the sound of our own
footsteps. Our feet that, as the season progressed, began to
mutter Slow down,
won’t you….please, for goodness’ sake, you simply must slow down.
"And
out of the slowing down, if we listened to those feet, arose a
kind of blessedness as well. The kind that might have moved us to
put up festive lights a little earlier in the season, aware that
the increased lights and colours may have helped to cheer our
neighbours. The kind that may even have moved us in an era of
global stress and anxiety to speak with neighbours a bit longer
when we saw them, and with more solicitous interest than usual,
especially the elderly and the vulnerable... although hopefully
always at a two-metre distance.
"Someone
told me this week that I should listen carefully, in order to
hear the sound of nature politely applauding our efforts. But if
we can’t hear it, he said, this will be only because of the
silence in between all other occurring things… the silence that
assures that in spite of everything else, our hearts really are
still in wonderful working order, still fond of us, and nowhere
near prepared to stop."
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