AQ: Anno Quarantini Quarantine

A word that has invaded our everyday vocabulary so violently and brought up unprecedented changes in our global community. Nonetheless, at the beginning of 2020, to force millions of people into their homes to protect themselves from the coronavirus pandemic only seemed like a sci-fi movie script or a conspiracy theory.
 
What happens during the quarantine is predictable to some extent and without any particular interest. That includes movie marathons, cooking experiments with or without success, workouts and meditation for some, and books, board games, and virtual hangouts for others. All this accompanied by anxiety, fear, and impatience for this adventure to end for us, our friends, our parents and (mostly) our grandparents.
 
Words lose their meaning, though, when it comes to talking about life after the quarantine. Most people look forward to this liberation, and they fantasize about it like it’s a redemptive, complete return to their former daily life. It’s as if for so long someone had stopped time and now the same person will press a button, and everything will continue from where they left off. Perhaps, in fact, we need to believe that life after the pandemic will bring back everything it took from us without any warning. It’s as if it owes us the routine we renounced for its sake. After all, people tend to forget about the bad stuff and get used to the ease of freedom quickly.
 
The truth, however, is that the global crisis we are experiencing will radically change us and the world around us. And while many of these changes were expected to happen in the future, this emergency has accelerated them rapidly. As a result, humanity isn’t ready to face them!
 
Apart from the self-evident political and economic changes that will take place worldwide, and for which many scholars have written their own scenarios, it is certain that changes will be observed in each one of us individually. What resemblance will we ourselves have before and after the unprecedented quarantine process?
 
Initially, people will turn more to science after the end of this experiment. The quarantine test created the need to believe in someone who has the answers to all the questions that we thought of, while locked between four walls. Perhaps more people with scientific backgrounds will become “influencers”, and those who seemed to stay away from the international battle against the coronavirus will disappear from the forefront. We realized, in short, that humanity needs the constant presence of those that possess knowledge and are able to transmit it for the common good, and not from those who are consumed in the endless and meaningless self-promotion.
 
On a more personal level, in the years AQ (Anno Quarantini), we will appreciate ourselves a little more, as well as every previously insignificant habit of ours. A car drive, a meaningful conversation, a nice song, a two-metre hug or a caring text. We will love a little more those for which we were scared and those that were scared for us. We will stop saying “from tomorrow”, and we will take advantage of each day as if a new quarantine were to start the next one. We will listen to our body and its needs, and we will dedicate a little more time to understand ourselves, because that’s how the quarantine taught us, simply as that.
 
Indeed, the first day of freedom will not only bring bright colours and positive thoughts. Inevitably, the reality we lived in will have left a dark mark on each one individually, but also all of us collectively. It is a thought that maybe the end of quarantine may not signal the end of the emergency but a temporary ceasefire that leaves us on a knife-edge between the neutral zone and the battlefield.
 
Quarantine has become a familiar word. And if we leave it behind soon, we will often bring it back to our memory, because it may have taken a lot from us, but it gave us more. It gave us our health and our people. It gifted us the belief that man can really accomplish anything previously considered impossible. Because, as the Israeli journalist and writer Yuval Noah Harari said: “Yes, the storm will pass, humankind will survive, most of us will still be alive — but we will inhabit a different world.”
 

Review: Niki Saridaki

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