Ok. It's April 10th. We are somewhere in the Corona pandemic. How do you experience the situation at the moment?
This is a good question about the experience, because I think experiencing is what we do most at the moment. And for me, it seems like being in a liminal period without knowing a limit, which is quite disturbing. And I try to avoid getting lost in that feeling by somehow establishing your daily routine with my work again. Without being at the places I normally would be. So as I'm writing my thesis, I have many places I can go to to work, like the library or an office I have or sometimes also from home. So I normally decide by my moods which place is best for me to work. And at the moment I'm forced to visit only one place, which is my office, where I can be alone and not being disturbed by my two kids or my husband at home.
But also this daily routine is, of course, different than the normal routine because kids are at home and I have to share the care for them with my husband. And what was quite difficult for both of us at the beginning was having both children at home. My son is going to school and, of course, you got some homework for being busy or being kept busy at home.
But my daughter is in kindergarten and so she also needed some tasks to do. So we both discussed about what kind of creative projects we could invent for for both of them and especially for my daughter. That was interesting because we had to engage in this process and being a couple this is not always an easy process. To follow through with what we decided what to do with them. And I think I created some projects focusing more on places to visit with them and going out. That was a nice experience to see how we keep each other busy and also the children at the same time.
But still, next to these established routines, for me, every day has somehow a different feeling to it, because it still is disturbing and not the same as before. I mean, I wake up and I feel that there's something different and I don't really know how to get the hang of it. It's not really tangible what is different, because, everything seems to be normal and on the other hand, everything is not quite normal. And people live their lives differently: going out is different, I move differently through the world and I do different things. I can´t see and feel my neighbours and friends and family.
What was very important for me in establishing a routine and also to avoid getting lost in this feeling of insecurity and overthinking phases was starting to meditate again. What I do in the morning is getting up, having a tea and sitting down for 20 minutes to to meditate, taking the opportunity to experience this feeling of just being here and now, trying to to work with these anxieties that are there. Facing them but also not letting them overcome myself.
Is there anything you learned about yourself or about your society or your city at the moment or anything? Any new information or any new insight you get?
Something that is new for me is to experience to be in a very new situation at home, in which everything might change from yesterday to today within a night. I learned to find strategies to cope with these kind of feelings. But somehow it was like being on a journey: when you come to a new place, you also have to learn to find a way of living again and find yourself again in a place and establish yourself in a place.
And I think I experienced this before when I went to two other places where I did my field work for example. To not have any contacts and having to establish new contacts. But this, of course, is different. Like not having the opportunity to establish new contacts in the way I'm used to establish contacts normally.
What I learned is that it's quite important for me to have face to face contacts and also body contact when I'm with my friends and with people. To just like touch the shoulder of another person or smile to each other and see the facial expression of a person. That is a wider communication than the communication you're just having on a phone or on a screen. And this is something I really missed. And that also makes me feel more alone and insecure than I experienced it before.
Thank you. So now I want to invite you to look ahead to a time where we learned to live well with this virus. When you think of the future, is that something you want less of? And or is there something you want more of in your life or in the environment you live in?
I would say that a good thing that we can learn or take out of the situation at the moment is that even if we are a little bit more set apart from each other, somehow we might feel nearer to each other, in a kind of solidarity, we are all facing the same situation. And maybe this creates a kind of collective emotional base.
And I can see that things might move into a similar direction – more than usual, when things go in different directions and people have different interests and motivations and are more like focused on their own motivations and aims and ideas of a good living.
And at the moment, I can feel that we all somehow experience the value of the place we are living. And I am lucky because we are here in Germany. In a very nice area in Tübingen where you have forests all around and a river. But I think you can always find places to go to a forest or to make a walk. And maybe people who live in cities will value more places that are nearby to travel to. Or to buy food or to make a holiday or a trip to feel more free or attached also to the environment. And I think this is really a chance to value the places we are living at and not aiming always for for places to travel to that are really far away. And also not nice anymore because too many people are traveling these places nowadays. So this is one idea.
And also, I think connected to that idea is the idea of establishing community where we are able to live in these environments together and are able to form the places we are living at together in a form that makes us all comfortable. I think that the communities in places could become stronger and could be forced bye projects that are set up by local governments to connect each other in the places we are living in and make strengthen existing projects and more visible to communities.
Thank you. If you think over of the future. What is your wildest dream for yourself or for your city or for your environment? What is a dream, you potentially, maybe even not allow yourself to dream. So what's your wildest dream for the future?
My wildest dream? I think maybe it's more a calm dream. An initial dream or maybe a secret? It's not really a secret. Sometimes I talk about it, but I don't really let it grow. I think my dream is living in the kind of community with people on a kind of a farm where we are gardening and having some animals and having some small projects together: Like building a hut in the garden and making art together and making music together and inviting friends to sleep under the sky in the garden. I Something like this, where you have a community in which you can share activities, but without having a fixed ideology. More something that is always allowed to grow and be more free. Somewhere nearby, where we are more sustainable by our own activities.
Beautiful, thank you very much.
Thank you.
