If the second lockdown is to work, people need to get behind it. We need to feel its importance once again, and I think we need rituals to help us
Thought for the Day 07.11.2020
As England starts its four week lockdown, here in Wales, we’re coming to the end of a two week circuit-breaker. The first time round there was a strong sense of crisis. This time, my son’s at school and I’ve slipped back easily into the patterns I set up in the Spring for working and keeping in touch.
The mood’s changed as well. Rainbows have disappeared from the windows. Short term sacrifice has become a longterm slog; the costs of the lockdown weigh more heavily; and, as the days shorten, many of us are feeling really tired of it all.
And yet, the crisis is still here.
I particularly miss the Thursday night ritual of clapping in the street: seeing neighbours in their doorways and hearing the applause reverberating across the city. As well as supporting the NHS, I felt we were clapping for each other. We were making contact and recognising the disconcerting experience we were sharing. I sensed viscerally, in the way a ritual enables, that we were allies, supporting each other to maintain a shared effort
A century ago, the sociologist Emile Durkheim argued that human beings use rituals to create a shared sense of meaning. That’s very much the role of ritual in Buddhism, where it centres on the notion of going for Refuge to what we call the Three Jewels. This means placing a deep trust and faith in the Buddha and the possibility of Enlightenment; in the Dharma, or the teachings that lead to Enlightenment; and the Sangha, or the community of those who follow the path. Shared commitment to the Three Jewels unites Buddhists, connecting our lives to values that transcend our individual concerns.
In a similar way, Durkheim’s followers suggest, we create secular rituals to bind society together. Remembrance Sunday, which we mark tomorrow, is a good example. It’s a shared national ritual including ceremony, reflection and bearing witness to wartime sacrifices.
If the second lockdown is to work, people need to get behind it. We need to feel its importance once again, and I think we need rituals to help us. I want rainbows. I want to clap outside my front door. And, even if we can’t attend Remembrance events, perhaps as well as thinking about those who lost their lives in war, tomorrow’s two minutes’ silence could be an opportunity to remember those fighting the medical battle right now.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece Vishvapani. You’re right about the missing rainbows and clapping. In the first lockdown there was no traffic for the first few weeks. This time in Green Lanes there seems to be just as much traffic as ever. The cafes are doing a brisk trade in takeaway cappuccinos and you’d hardly know lockdown’s on. The places I work, as a writer, are all shut..the British library, all the libraries and no sitting in cafes with laptop. Writing’s a solitary activity so many of us need those spaces to stay connected . Isolation seems worse this time around. More Zoom meetings loom.