The pain of separation and the sweetness of reconnection
Hi everyone
First a question has come in about the testing for Covid-19 which is now becoming available. The current test is to see if you have the infection – not had the infection or will have the infection. The tests appear to be pretty accurate but repeat testing may be required if someone tests negative but is ill or if someone is well but has a positive test. And remember if you have a negative test you can still catch it the next day when you go out!
This week we should hear the government’s plans to ease lockdown…..which for many will begin a process of moving from saving lives to living lives. It is looking like a mixture of contact tracing and social distancing along with a graduated reduction in isolation. This will be so welcome – not least because people are missing the physical contact with their loved ones. Zoom and phone calls simply do not meet the human need for touch. Indeed the pain pathways of social isolation are the same as those of physical pain. And this process brings into focus the issue of how we reconnect after a period of separation.
Shelagh is my most longterm friend – she apparently came to my second birthday party. We grew up in Stamford, a beautiful market town in Lincolnshire, and we went out as teenagers. We have always stayed close. At university she married and then later divorced. Next she applied to and was granted by the Pope a dispensation to convert to Catholicism and become a Carmelite nun. For nearly forty years she has lived in this silent order in a monastery in rural Norfolk. I visit her about once every two years. It is a beautiful meeting – I arrive and wait in a ‘parlour’ - a sparse room divided into two by a low wall. She enters from the other side and we have a hug across the wall then sit separated. We drink tea and talk unrestrainedly for two hours and ten minutes until she leaves for another of her seven daily services. I say goodbye for another two years – the number of her visits are limited. The imposed intervening absences heighten our openness, our intimacy. While there is pain in separation there is also a different sweet pain of tenderness in reconnection.
And so it will be for many after lockdown as they meet again friends and loved ones. The connection may not always be through words but through touch and the unsaid. I am indebted to one of my good friends who reminded me of Marina Abramovitch. She is a Serbian performance artist who in her twenties fell passionately in love with Ulay with whom she then lived and worked. They decided to walk from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and marry when they met. It took five years to get permission to do this by which time their relationship had changed…..so they decided to do the walk but hold a ‘separation’ ceremony. This they did and that was the last time she saw Ulay. Many years later Marina was asked to put on a performance in New York and decided she would sit at a table for eight hours a day while members of the public could come in turn and sit silently for one minute in the chair opposite. She would open her eyes and look at them. The curator said it would never work as New Yorkers were too busy….but thousands queued. And after all those years of separation, so did Ulay. This is the video of their reconnection:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS0Tg0IjCp4&feature=youtu.be
How will you reconnect?
With love
Derek
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