The Road Ahead
Christmas morning sunrise // Te Mata Peak
It’s been a strange year for so many reasons but one thing above all else has changed the face of the past year, rendering it unrecognisable in comparison to the one hundred or so that preceded it. What those of us in the Western World thought was simply a localised disaster for a single Chinese province turned out to be a life changing event on a scale almost beyond comprehension. When Covid-19 was announced as a new strain of SARS that appeared to emerge from a wet market at the tail end of 2019, no one could have predicted what the global consequences would be. Most of us hardly batted an eyelid, it was a side story on most of the news sites. If someone had told me, back in December 2019, that in just a few short months we would be queing for hours to enter the supermarket one at a time and confined to our home for six weeks whilst employment was put on hold I would have branded them as a scaremongering lunatic, an alarmist at best.
Even now, over a year on from that initial outbreak, I still have trouble comprehending what we have all been through and how much has changed, perhaps for ever. At times it’s like a living nightmare. Were we really sitting at home for over a month, effectively on an extended, paid vacation? I have dream-like memories of the surreal ness of it all; Lining up with a hundred other people at six in the morning, inching forward step by step over the course of an hour or more, just to buy groceries. It was dark when we arrived and light by the time we entered. Then we’d walk around an empty store in almost complete silence wearing a mask and surgical gloves, avoiding other people at all costs and armed with the knowledge that only one or two of each food item was permitted. It’s like I fell asleep and drifted into an alternate dystopian universe, only to wake up unable to remember if it was real or not. And it seems like a lifetime ago, yet here we are today, still in the midst of the very same pandemic almost one year on.
Christmas Sunrise on the east face // Te Mata Peak
I’m convinced my dreamlike recollection is down to our location, the consequence of which is a life currently lived in a false reality. Living in New Zealand we were, and thankfully still are, shielded from the worst of it through a combination of government action and staunch compliance from a population small enough to pull together for the greater good. ‘Our team of five million’ may have sounded to outsiders like the traditional politician’s hyperbole but here on the ground it was a true reflection of a tiny nation of people coming together. A decision was made and everyone listened. The communication was clear and everyone understood. The result was providence and everyone was grateful. We willingly endured a short period of relative first World hardship, resulting in most of us being spared the worst of it.
Most, but not everyone. People still got sick and people still died. It may have been in far smaller numbers than almost anywhere else in the World but it was no less tragic. Through no fault of their own people succumbed to an unknown, lethal pathogen and in an age where we yearn for control of everything, it turned out we had control of nothing. Armed with all of our knowledge, all our technology, all our modern accoutrements of 21st Century living, the only thing we could do was to separate ourselves from each other and hope that an invisible, insidious biological predator wasn’t already lurking in our own body. The fact that in 2020 this was our only defence is something that has intrigued me ever since SARS-CoV-2 was discovered in the human population.
As a species we are capable of sending an autonomous, SUV-sized robot through 130 million km of open Space and land it safely on the Martian surface. We can ask a phone that recognises our retina, thumbprint and individual voice to switch the lights on in our home or warm up the car remotely on a cold day. We can launch, build and permanently occupy a Space Station the size of a football field, and conduct groundbreaking research in microgravity whilst circling the planet sixteen times a day. We have effectively cured AIDS. We can grow organs from biological tissue. We can sequence DNA and edit genes. We can send spacecraft to research planets and transmit data from the very outer reaches of the Solar System, (and in the case of Voyager 1 and 2, Interstellar space). We can do all of this and much, much more.
Yet when we were faced with an unknown variant of a Coronavirus, the only thing we could do was to simply stay away from other people. Not touch them. Stay out of breathing, sneezing or coughing distance. Wash our hands if we touched any surface and wipe our food down before unpacking it, or in the case of fresh fruit and vegetables, eating it. For all of our scientific, medical and technological advances over the undulating course of a millennia, all we could do was resort to the same method of protecting ourselves as people would have done when the Black Death came knocking at humanity’s door nearly seven centuries ago.
Of all the things to have arisen from this pandemic, this is the one thing I’ve had the hardest time accepting, but then it occurred to me that perhaps this intrinsic lack of acceptance is humanity’s problem. As a species we’ve become so reliant on our advancement of knowledge and technology that we’ve become complacent. After all, if we can accomplish the aforementioned successes, why should we be concerned with something as trivial, as mundane, as ‘everyday’ as a virus? Why indeed. I can’t help but think the natural world has a very deliberate way of putting us in our place, a place where in the grand scheme of things, our species is insignificant. A virus has no concern for touchscreen phones, social media likes or human centric notions of misplaced grandeur. For a virus our bodies are simply a means to an end, and yet it’s these bodies that will ultimately have to either fight it off or die trying.
I realise humanity has endured worse, and there may be a sharply dwindling number of people still alive that can remember such times, but the reality is that most of us have never experienced anything like this. We have never had our lives disrupted with such severity or lethality and yet, as with almost all human tales of disaster, the catalyst was of our own making. As tragic as this appears, it seems to me that we now have a chance to change the balance of our existence with the natural world and each other. It may well be the only positive to come out of this utterly tragic situation and that is that many of us have been given a chance to look inward and reassess what really matters to us. We have been given a chance to reset the board, draw new lines.
Based on the whole of recorded human history though, I’m skeptical as to whether we ever will.
