Normally when my neighbour sends me a text, my heart sinks with a particular fear. It's a very unique fear that people in upstairs flats have - if you've ever lived in one, you might know what I'm talking about. There's a damp patch in the ceiling. Is there a door slamming? Have you left something beeping? Can you smell gas?
So today, when she texted me from downstairs (and it's the first time in ages) I was all set for the worst.
"Hi Matt I hope you are ok - obviously if you do feel unwell let me know - I know you are part of the Church and if there is anything I can do to help in my spare time I can"
I replied and said I was feeling okay for the moment, and I of course would do the same.
Isn't that lovely? Meanwhile on my friends' street, someone's organised a community WhatsApp group by putting a note through each door offering help and support. Out of unthinkable isolation comes unsinkable community. I like to think that this kind of thing might be happening all over the country.
I've been contemplating today about how different it looks is when everything stops.
Sometimes we have snow days, and on snow days it feels like the very sound of the world changes. Traffic becomes the sound of kids pulling sledges. Car horns become the laughter of little voices on tea-trays hurtling down the slope in the park. The air is stiller somehow, blanketed, and it's as though there's a breather for everyone while we rest so helplessly stuck at home. For a while you remember how beautiful we can be.
I know. Snow days don't tend to be this dangerous or this fearful either, and I don't want to minimise the seriousness of it all, but it does feel as though, out here in the shadows, the very sound of the world is changing this week.
I've spoken to so many people - way more than usual - and not just about technical writing! I've had video calls, phone calls, deep, deep WhatsApps; I've written haiku, jingles, poems and stories, and I've made a board game! I've told my parents I love them, I've read, I've laughed, I've eaten biscuits, and I've got sad, happy, relieved, and anxious all within the same five minutes.
It's really rather lovely that suddenly we've been given a whole load of our most precious resource. None of us talk about how busy we are. None of us are rushing off to the next thing. All that stuff we thought was so important seems so trivial; we're all just at home. We seem to suddenly have time for each other. As troublesome as it is right now out there, I don't want that revelation to pass me by.
And those of us who aren't raiding the supermarket for hand sanitizer and pot noodles are using that time hopefully, to change the sound of the world, taking it back to the stuff that makes us who we are deep-down, on these kindest and strangest of snow days.
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