Learning to be present in the age of estrangement

Natasha Badhwar

Both my brothers called yesterday in back-to-back calls. One lives in the same city as me and often gets in touch when he is on his way to work. The other lives in another continent and his calls tend to bookend my days. His mornings are my end of day and vice versa. As we discussed family life and teenage children, our conversation meandered towards our growing-up years, as it often does. We looked back for clues to understand our own parenting impulses. We reminded each other of our personal experience of alienation and anxiety when we were teenagers, to see if it would help us connect to the same in our children today.

By the time I had finished these two calls, I had rearranged the entire furniture in our living and dining rooms as well as changed the tablecloth, cushion covers and bedsheet on the diwan. I must have looked oddly hyperactive as I talked animatedly while deftly balancing the cellphone, and moving tables and chairs across the rooms as noiselessly as possible. When the calls were over, I stood back and admired the new colours and neatness around me. I used the same phone to take a photo and sent it to my husband who has been away for 10 days. As if to say, “Come back soon, look how nice everything is looking here.”

In the conversations with my siblings, we had been navigating through complex and confusing emotional terrain. We were acknowledging knots in our relationships that we didn’t yet know how to untangle. At the same time, almost subconsciously, I was fixing something else that I could improve immediately. I was administering a small dose of therapy to myself.

This is a metaphor for our lives, stranded by the pandemic, I thought to myself. When grappling with things larger than ourselves, our self seeks balance by focusing on the small details we do have control over. I may not be able to fix the big hurts, but I can dress up the superficial wounds. Small acts of attention will eventually add up to restore us.

A year-and-a-half of living through this disruptive Covid-19 pandemic has offered many unexpected insights. Sometimes, we are too close to see the patterns. Often, they repeat and it’s hard to miss the lesson staring at us.

An important learning has been about how to be present. One of the first challenges of the lockdown was that we found ourselves cut off from those who were far from us. We responded to the restriction of no commuting and no long-distance travel by quickly finding ways to meet online in cyberspace. It took a couple of months of work-from-home and schooling via the Internet for our children to point out to us that while we were spending more time at home than we had ever before, they missed our presence in their lives, perhaps even more acutely.

Being in the same space with each other all the time has not necessarily translated to being together. The pressure to stay connected to those who are physically far away but available online has drained us of the emotional energy required to pay attention to those who are right there besides us. Our intimate spaces are paying the price of our constant availability in our workplaces and other online spaces.

The age of the pandemic is threatening to become a time of great estrangement if we do not see the signs in time and fight off the temptation that technology constantly entices us with. We need our homes to be a place of rest and restoration again, not just a space where we recharge our devices that connect us to the world outside. The family we are stuck with will thrive again when we log off from others and bring our attention back to each other.

Collectively we have been overwhelmed by death, disease and the loss of order in both our public and private lives. We must find ways to heal ourselves incrementally as the traumas pile up. Small acts of beauty will heal us. Caring will restore us.

— The writer is a filmmaker & author. [email protected]

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