Perfectly locked-down

Lockdown number five in Melbourne was tough. Necessary, yes, but tough. Having now spent more than six months in hard lockdown since the beginning of the pandemic, the hardest thing for me was observing (and finally being unable to pretend it was otherwise) what will be long-term impacts on my young children. We’ve done the right thing, as a community, I’m sure, but coming to see the once solid and pristine structures of my little ones looking weatherworn and even showing some cracking at the foundations has been a concern, to say the least. They have sore spots and even wounds on their minds’ shoulders from where we’ve asked them to carry heavy burdens – the true weight of which they can’t possibly understand and which I minimise in my hapless positive pep talks. Sadly, it could also be said that lockdown is not really over. It is not a binary state. Although we’ve been offered release, for some of us the key to the isolation trauma-locks might as well be at the bottom of a haystack! Being locked-down, is grammatically speaking, we might say, in the present perfect tense. It is something that has happened in the past, but which has ongoing implications. We might be free to roam now, more or less, but some of us – perhaps children most of all, without even knowing it – are still locked-down. I will, no doubt, have my critics telling me I should not write these things, but we need to be able to simultaneously affirm and abide by our public health directives in a time of pandemic while also acknowledging the cost. If we get the tense wrong, we misunderstand the meaning! It should be perfectly acceptable to read your having been locked-down in the perfect tense. If you don’t, you fail to see the definition – as in contours or subtleties – of its reality. And when you fail, or refuse, to see reality, then it is hard to heal from its bruising. In the Christian scriptures, specifically the Letter to the Ephesians, there is a famous statement that uses the present perfect tense. It reads like this … “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” The verb to be “saved”, in that sentence, is in the present perfect. Meaning, as it plainly reads, that the salvation it speaks of is something that has not just happened – like an historical release from bondage – but that the salvation is a state that one continues to be in. It is an in-faith-reality for the Christian that they are saved in such a way that their liberty is a way of being – one that informs their state of mind as they move on through life. Words matter. If being “locked-down” must be read in the present prefect, and remain, at least partially, our state of mind even when we are roaming free, then perhaps we should change the language. Down, unavoidably, has negative connotations. Maybe next time (God forbid!) we should refer to it as being “locked-in”. That way, when the tense in which we find ourselves reading the word reveals that an inner captivity remains, we might then seek to reframe our tension – we might be able to see our being locked-in as a saving grace, and as an ongoing intentional state of mind. Imagining being “locked-in” might lead us to consider being locked-in to community-mindedness and support of one another, before, during or after periods of lock(down). Perhaps like the salvation that is written of in the Letter to the Ephesians, that is a gift of God, we might come to see having a locked-in mindset is a perfect gift to ourselves and to others •