Aeroplane over the Sea

What have I told myself in the end of last year? Oh yeah, write more. Is it fine to start in the middle of a quarantine on a Thursday evening, in the midst of a worldwide epidemic?
I can hear you say, well, go ahead. Because many of us, for the shortly foreseeable future, will be staying in our homes. Why? To hide from something we unintentionally created to haunt us. 

It didn`t start so quickly I would like to say. But that wouldn´t be the complete truth. Two weeks ago, I could feel something was coming, and I had a pretty disturbing weekend with the thought of that. If my 2-weeks later self would go back in time, she would definitely warn me:

There-will-be-no-toilette-papers-left!

This is a small, dark comedic side of what has been happening in the last weeks all over the world. The horror that haunts us, a virus, that is spreading over all the continents, without discriminating anyone. No, this is not a cheap Hollywood movie script. This is a pandemic. 

WHO (World Health Organisation) says that a disease being pandemic doesn't change the severity of the disease itself, rather it tries to imply that all the countries act according to this knowledge. Well... That is a tricky one to discuss. In many ways, it is utterly strange to experience the same dystopic reality all over the world. At least, from day 6 of my self-isolation, this is how I feel. It has a strange comfort in it that, for a minute, you can see that everyone is going through similar feelings; shock, denial, fear, stress, hope, strength, courage, and so on... But aren´t we experiencing all these feelings at any given time? Why do we feel more connected in these times more than others? Why don´t we, say, when losing a job, remind ourselves that we are not the only ones in this world with this situation? Or, when we lose someone, why don´t we confront ourselves with the fact that everyone will lose someone they love today or tomorrow?

There is something in the way that exposing ourselves to each other´s experiences (thanks to social media) makes it better and worse at the same time. Why better? Because that´s where the power of a single person on people starts to work. We would never be motivated, if someone would just told us to not to go out. But when we see, a famous celebrity is also having the disease, or say another one is doing live concerts just for us to stay home, we feel stimulated. Triggered by the fact that, we are in no means special (we are in danger) and people who are special to us are in danger too.

Why is it worse? Because then again, some people are more equal than others (Hi Orwell!) and we start to feel the differences that only humankind created; like wealth, distribution of equal rights, and different political approaches...

Humanity has been battling with diseases, wars and all the other crap that the universe was hitting back at us for ruining the nature in this chubby planet Earth. But among all these, I feel that we all have never felt so vulnerable. Maybe our ancestors did when they had to deal with these kinds of things back in old centuries. However we, having the most powerful connections, technology and all the aspects of a globalized world, have never really known what it is really like to bend the knee to a small creature, that is just looking for a home to survive and try to convince each other to do something. 

If I get started, I can write hours about how humans create their own enemies, and they will be the end of the human race- but no, I just want to say that this is day 6 in-home isolation, from Saarbrücken, Germany. I am about to finish my Ph.D. to become a Doctor of Philosophy in Medicinal Chemistry, but it feels like I have learned a lot in these last two weeks (and a month to come) than my last three years in this funny small city.

We are going through historical moments, so I wanted to leave a note in the shelf.


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