Healing from the pandemic, now

Lately, I can’t help but feel impatient at life not moving fast enough. Yet, looking back on the experiences and people that have been lost to the past few years in a raging pandemic, it feels like everything has changed. This is a moment that calls for quiet reflection, resilience, and a lot of patience. None of these things feel natural to do for a deeply anxious person who is used to distracting herself with unending work.

For some of us, joy and normality have always lived in movement; the ability to experience the ordinary as special has only been an anomaly justified by the end of the workweek — the recourse of two days off, for appreciating all the ways in which free time can be spent, and for all the ways in which one would have spent it, if they had only a bit longer. As someone who has had more than her fair share of ‘a bit longer’ recently — as most of us have, either working or studying from home, or simply taking a longer break from routine than expected — I see that it is not all that it is cut out to be. Having responsibilities and concrete goals on a daily basis makes life all the more worth living. Being able to get up, get dressed, leave home, and spend the whole day working towards something and looking forward to coming back to your place of rest, for rest, has been the most familiar experience for many of our lives. Having lost this in recent years, our relationship with home, and the outside world, has shifted drastically.

Countless researchers, academics, and writers have already made the point of how damaging home-bounded-ness has been for individuals world over; students, in particular, are arguably the worst affected. From greater incidence of abuse, neglect, and learning losses, to losing key years of socialisation among other people, in a normal world. And this is to say nothing of the immense financial vulnerability that many families have been experiencing since 2019. For years, educators and researchers have been calling for inculcating grit and resilience among learners — globalised and localised experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic speak to the enormity of courage, innovation, and grit required to keep going on day after day, not only for the average child but for adults that we might, naively, have expected to fare better. This is not a normal moment, and many of us have not been kind enough to ourselves, and those around us in acknowledging what we are going through, collectively, but more so, individually.

If ever there was a moment to make grit and resilience key learning goals, and to map curricular learning objectives and exercises to this, it is now. Be it at school, or the workplace, for teachers, their students, or professionals at your place of employment — we need to prioritise building coping skills, in order to recover from this experience in a sustainable way. The isolation and loss experienced during this time has taken its toll and ignoring it will only mean leaving wounds to fester. Whether this results in trauma that families, employers, and states will spend the next few decades trying to mitigate, or real financial losses when unhealed problems come to the surface and hinder productivity and community-level wellness, future costs are always harder to bear than present efforts at pre-empting and responding to the needs of those most emotionally vulnerable.

Be it in the form of meditation programmes, mental health workshops, clinical psychological support, or school counseling, we need to enact programmes and policies to protect generations across the board from spiralling into despair. Grit and resilience are skills that we need to build now, by teaching key coping mechanisms and providing open lines of support, and communication.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd, 2022.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.