Covid-19: Don’t go back to sleep
“The breezes at dawn have secrets to tell you
Don’t go back to sleep
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch,
The door is round and open
Don’t go back to sleep” (Rumi)
I recorded this video late on 19th March. As you can see from my face, I am extremely tired from the intensity of the first wave of response, anxiety and organising in response to Covid-19. But sometimes tiredness breeds directness, and clarity.
This video is a call to shift perception of what could be possible in this time. The transcript is written out here.
So… We find ourselves in a complete systems meltdown.
Nobody expected this two weeks ago… We started the week just two weeks ago thinking we were entering just another Monday to Friday, 9–5, whatever normal ‘mode’ it is that you usually live your life by.
And in the space of basically a week to 10 days, we’ve entered a completely unprecedented time. This situation can only be compared to the scale of what happened in World War II. That’s the last time something of this scale happened.
And the difference is that this time instead of it being a war, where we’re fighting each other and we’re warring and it’s based on human ideology and politics, what’s happened here is one tiny little piece of DNA, a tiny virus, that has created more change in 2 weeks than has happened in the world in 50 years.
We’ve been so trapped in completely bureaucratic systems. There have been many of us who have been calling for this change: stopping taking flights; stopping the education system being the way it is; stopping working in ways that don’t make sense; stopping importing food from across the world in plastic packaging to get into a supermarket based on supply chains.
To now a time when local veg box companies are booming, and people are ordering local vegetables. People are using their common sense to decide who to trust, how to build community, how to extend beyond not knowing anybody in your neighbourhood. Suddenly it’s become obvious how ridiculous our old ways have been.
It’s as if this virus has provided us with a mirror to look in the mirror and see how fragile, non-sensical, bureaucratic, disconnected, isolated and numb and dissociated we’ve all become.
There is a lot of talk about how we’re going through an awful time… That many people are going to be in pain and many people are going to die. We’re starting to see it already. Many of us now know at least one person who has been infected and suffered.
And yes… But. People have been in pain and dying due to inequality this whole time — it’s just that we haven’t been talking about it, or mobilising around it.
We could have used Whatsapp groups at any point to mobilise our communities. To reach out to the elderly who are living alone, who don’t have anyone to rely on, who can’t get access to food, who are dying alone, isolated, lonely and disconnected… And it’s taken a huge pandemic to just show us that this society is not making sense.
Now I’m not saying that I’m thankful for this virus, but I do have to say that I feel as if we’ve been given an incredible second chance.
This is the closest metaphor I can think of to describe this situation: we’ve been on a train that has been hurtling towards a cliff-edge, an irreversible cliff-edge — once we’re off that cliff there’s no way of re-winding that train or stopping the train once we’re off the cliff-edge those systems are in play (and I’m obviously referring to climate change). And it’s as if we’ve basically had a fire in one of the carriages, and it’s made us stop the train. And suddenly we’ve looked outside and we’ve asked: why are we on a train that is hurtling towards that cliff-edge? We need to stop the train.
So, I understand that people are really afraid, people are anxious, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Every day we’re living from day to day, many people are self-isolating already… This might go on for 12–18 months if we’re waiting until a vaccine is produced. It’s a frightening time. And yet, it feels like such a small sacrifice to finally be able to throw off the systems that have been keeping us living in a numb, dissociated hellish way, that’s been killing people the whole time.
I’ve been speaking to a lot of people, back to back on calls, trying to be part of the response to this virus to put some systems in place to support the most vulnerable. And… It is terrifying for sure. And people are afraid.
I guess I just wanted to put this message out there, that I feel that — I feel afraid too, and yet I feel there has never been a more important time in potentially preserving Life on Earth, and reconnecting with the real reason why we’re here, and the real ways we could be living, in sync with our planet, in connection with each other, and actually aligned with a deeper meaning of being alive on this Earth.
I hope that is helpful in some way to hear…
We’re in this together.
Thank you.
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Phoebe Tickell — Catalyzing transformative innovation in the face of converging crises, advising on complexity approaches, systems design, regenerative leadership, and education for regenerative development.
