It is a year since I turned up for work and was given my computer and told to work from home. It got reminiscing and I remembered the article Bill Clinkenbeard wrote for the website nearly a year ago, he has now written another:
On Being Disconnected
The restrictions placed upon us by Covid19 mean that we all become disconnected.
We said before that our identity depends on social maintenance, but that is the very thing threatened by disconnection. We all know what it’s like to lose our broadband or Wi-Fi connection. We are unable to have vital conversations or do important transactions like banking. If we should learn anything at all from lockdown it is that our networks are so important.
We have formal networks: established channels for contacting the surgery, the bank, the energy supplier, the supermarket and so on. Fortunately, most of our formal network remains intact, apart from communal worship. But we also have informal or social networks which work through broadband, telephone and person-to- person. These are likely to suffer during the lockdown. And above that we have a network of destinations, places we like, places that we enjoy going to, such as the church, the restaurant, the pub and the garden centre. Such places help us to reaffirm who we are, but under the restrictions we can’t reach our destinations.
And so it is that life becomes a kind of question mark: What day is it, what time is it, what are we going to do tomorrow, who has died without our knowing? When we think about life returning to some kind of normal it seems vital for us to plan how we might re-establish our networks.
March 15, 2021 Bill Clinkenbeard