All kinds of masks are coming off in this pandemic season. Even as we put on one kind of superficial mask, others are dropping off.
Make-up has become make-do. Eyes, at most, get a kohl treatment. The rest of the face is settling into its natural state.
Fashionable clothes are sitting idle in the closet. The ones that make us feel comfortable in our skin are claiming centerfold.
Perhaps most curious, though, is the way in which the mask of superficiality has dropped from relationships. Real conversations are happening.
Maybe it’s because we’ve run out of things to talk about with each other. The lockdowns have run for so long now that families secluded with only each other have depleted safe topics. The usual ground has gotten covered so many times that, out of sheer need for novelty, hitherto dangerous subjects are feeling acceptable to bring up.
But I suspect it is more than this. I think the coronavirus has forced us to face our mortality and how truly uncertain is our time on Earth. It is contagious from the most dispersed source, the air we share with other human beings, so there is no getting away from it. It is everywhere. There is no cure for it. And, it is taking a lot of lives, often in painful ways.
And so, we are finding ourselves in an extraordinary level of insecurity about our very existence. I might die tomorrow is not so far-fetched a thought. Things feel more uncertain than ever. Anything can happen, I think, I can catch it from practically anyone and anywhere.
In this climate of heightened unsureness, it therefore feels very natural to bare one’s true self. Let me clean up open wounds. Let me tell my loved ones how much I truly love them. Or, sometimes, let me drop the pretense and accept a relationship for how little it is. Let me be reconciled to things as they are. Let me be honest before I must go.
I don’t think much has changed from pre-Covid19 to now. In the world before, the same uncertainty was there, the same possibility that a random brick would fall on your head and your time would be up. It’s just that the nature of this virus has made us confront our mortality with more immediacy and a greater sense of awareness of how little control we truly have over our lives.
I reflected on this at the very beginning, as the crisis was unfolding, about how it has brought the whole world to a standstill and is compelling us to reconsider what we’ve been chasing so desperately. It’s something we should be doing anyway, to keep checking if we’re living the lives we want, if we’re being our whole selves, if we’re bringing our individual light to the world.
As such, the virus, really Mother Nature, seems to have a sense of humour as it goes about its way. In making us put on one type of useful mask, she’s stripping us of the other useless ones.
Archana and more 