Solitude

Self-Sacrifice and Pandemics are intimate friends. In order for a pandemic to end we must learn to do without things that we need. We go without meeting friends for months, we go without hugs or handshakes for months. We go without restaurants, bars, cafés or cinemas for months. We go without needing the internal combustion for days at a time.

Human Contact

I mention all of these things looking at the past 76 days. Yesterday I had my first human to human contact in that many days. Today I shook my first hand. Between yesterday and today I transitioned from being two or more meters from people at all times to being close. I went into homes that were not my own.

It’s the sixtieth day of solitude for some of us and if we look at Twitter we see that people in other countries are suffering. One person spoke of the dark dog whilst another expressed distress. A third expresses another emotion. Around the world we see people suffering and trying to cope in their own unique ways.

I went for my daily walk but I wasn’t fully motivated so it was a relatively short circuit. Just 7.65 kilometres according to my SUUNTO Spartan HR Sports Wrist, Black. It’s the watch I’ve been using for at least three or four years by now. I am no longer tracking with the Apple watch as I was tired of deleting duplicates.

Today I went on a photo walk. Since walking far is now out of the question if you want to be consistently socially distanced it makes sense to go out with a different purpose. When the purpose of the walk is to take photos you can afford to walk up a hill, or between two people to avoid being too close.

A cat naps in a courtyard in the middle of the day during the 2020 Pandemic in Arnex-Sur-Nyon.

I was writing a Facebook post when I thought of the term Pandemic Solitude and I love it so much that I wanted to use it as a title for today’s blog post. For most people during the pandemic the order is, stay with the people you live with but avoid being close to others.

When you live with no one this means that you should avoid being close to anyone. Yesterday and today I exchanged words with petrol station workers from two meters away, and with a plate of plexiglass between us. I also talked to a scooter shop owner and here too I stayed about three meters away. It might sound distant in other times but that’s intimate during a pandemic.

Today is Day Four of Orca in Switzerland and I saw that the Canton in which I live has the most active cases of COVID19 so my motivation both to go to shops and to go for walks has taken a hit. At the same time I don’t know whether it’s COVID 19 that is having this effect or the fact that I walked a theoretical 197.2 kilometres since the start of this month for the March Activity challenge.