Write an article on the topic ' The importance of being self reliant during lockdown '
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The experience, which only lasted a week, was intolerable. He later wrote: “As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude.”
It’s hard to believe now, but until relatively recently, solitude – or the experience of being alone for significant periods of time – was treated with a mixture of fear and respect. It tended to be restricted to enclosed religious orders and was thus a privileged experience of a male elite. Change was only set in motion by the Reformation and the Enlightenment, when the ideologies of humanism and realism took hold and solitude slowly became something that anyone could acceptably seek from time to time. Most people in the West are now used to some regular form of solitude – but the reality of lockdown is making this experience far more extreme.
I have spent the last few years researching the history of solitude, looking into how people in the past managed to balance community ties and solitary behaviours. This has never seemed more relevant.
Take the example of my own community. I live – and now work – in an old house in an ancient Shropshire village in England. In the 11th-century Domesday Book it was recorded as a viable community, on a bluff of land above the River Severn. Over the centuries, its self-sufficiency has declined. Now it has no services beyond the church on Sunday.
But it has long displayed a collective spirit, mostly for seasonal entertainment and the maintenance of a village green, which contains the ruins of a castle built to keep the Welsh in Wales. Planning was taking place for a formal ball in a marquee on the green this autumn, which has yet to be cancelled. In the meantime, the Neighbourhood Watch group, in place to deal with very rare criminal activity, has delivered a card to all residents, offering to help with “picking up shopping, posting mail, collecting newspapers, or with urgent supplies”. There is a WhatsApp group where many locals are offering support.
For the first time in generations, the attention of the inhabitants is not focused on the resources of the region’s urban centres. The nearby A5, the trunk road from London to Holyhead and thence to Ireland, no longer goes anywhere important. Instead, the community has turned inwards, to local needs, and the capacity of local resources to meet them.
This experience of a small British settlement reflects the condition of many in Western societies. The COVID-19 crisis has led us to embrace new technologies to revitalise old social networks.
As we begin to come to terms with the lockdown, it is important to understand the resources at our disposal for coping with enforced isolation.