Isolation

We smile at each other from a distance. Looking at one another while our bodies have to avoid each other at a distance.When did I last shake hands with someone? I try to remember, but I can’t.
On these days of new and still unfamiliar distance, most people also avoid eye contact. They move in strange serpentines so as not to offend other passers-by. To the lowered glances, ears are often closed as well. The spacial separation is amplified by an acoustic one. Headphones emphasize the hermetic inner space for many. A casual conversation could be infectious. Our life in the new zones of deliberately protected sterility. Our life in the séparée of an increasingly rigorously partitioned and publicly defended individual sphere. A life as if behind a protective screen. It is easy to imagine the protective clothing of medical emergency workers.

A blossom that folds and closes in a paradoxical impulse back to the bud. Maybe it got too much sun.

If humanity were a child, one might think, it would push back into the womb these days.
Whole societies are in shut down and locked in. If the sky is closing, one feels the abyss of comatose standstill and could easily confuse the momentary calm with an eternal one.

“Bunker mood”, observes media theorist Peter Weibel in the present day socium. A contagious phenomenon. Every one for himself among the many. These days, the term hermit has taken on a new meaning. Welcome to the new distance society …

Maybe we have been sitting too close to each other for far too long, and this is what we have now: a virus that forces us to retreat.

Assuming that humanity has actually crawled back into the womb these days. Sure, we know, a state like that won’t last. The child must be born, even if it is called humanity. A lot of things went wrong in his previous life. Or maybe things just got terribly complicated. The economy with its swaps and flops, its derivatives and bailouts that nobody understands anymore. From consumerism and capitalism to the climate crisis, from health care to redistribution – many people have ideas, nobody knows what works anymore. The system has decoupled itself from the people. This frustrates politicians who are supposed to make sustainable and systemically relevant decisions. And it depresses the technocrats who want to optimise systematically. Many people think that little of it succeeds. Capitalism continues to bloat. The world is getting hot flashes. Fire is rolling like a fever in some areas. In others, water eats the coasts. We mourned it, yet we kept taking off and flying. But now finally the planes stay on the ground. For this a virus has landed. It took this arrival in horror to make us pause.

The era of air travel and mass mobility will perhaps be remembered as the era of frenzied standstill. Now begins the era of the standstill of frenzy (Weibel). Airfields where no planes take off, orphaned highways and railway lines, roads so empty that you can picnic on them. A slowdown of life. The quiet cities seem like invitations to wander in them again. The air is better than ever these days.

Suppose not only individuals, but whole civilisations could be reborn. They rise, they fall, they perish, a new one comes into life. One thing is certain, no civilisation is born twice.
What’s obviously dying out: physical proximity. Students in overcrowded lecture halls, employees treading on each other’s toes in offices, shopping-hungry consumers pushing past each other in shopping malls, fans crowding together in stadiums and at festivals, parades with thousands of participants – all that is yesterday’s news. Prohibited in the present, feared in the future because potentially dangerous. Welcome to the new distance society …

Because proximity has become dangerous, we will set up in the distance.

“Only temporarily,” contradict the backward looking among the prophets.
I think they are wrong. After this coronavirus will be before the next and new one. Corona demonstrates that the mass accumulations of modernity offer too much proximity for viruses. They jump from one to the next, microscopic free-riders of mobility, travel by plane as fast as an arrow, hop across national borders and spread congenially continental.
The holiday society in particular has waged war against nature, claims Weibel. “The virus forces us to end this war.”
Hopefully the world will recover now. Hopefully it will also be beneficial for the people. And we’ll find ways to be close to each other even far away. That’s probably what rebirth is all about.

Enjoy the silence! Stay healthy!

Yours – Otmar Jenner

P.S. Just received an audio file via mail – allegedly a message from the Association of German Psychiatrists: “Since we are flooded with calls, we would like to inform you, dear fellow citizens, that it is absolutely normal in the time of quarantine that you start talking to the walls, plants and other things. Please call us only if they answer to you. Thank you.”

P.S (2). Dear readers, English is not my mother tongue. If you find striking mistakes in the wording, please let me know (oj@otmarjenner.de).

#otmarjenner #corona #covid 19 #SARS-CoV-2 #energyhealing #healing #happiness #heal #healingvibes #energy #spirituality #meditation #spiritual #chakras #goodvibes #selflove #psychic #yoga #energybites #instagood #metaphysical #awakening #spiritualhealing #positiveenergy #energyhealer #consciousliving #consciousness #healingprocess #justhealing #compassion #forgiveness #guidance

“Dear friend and fellow prisoner,” a friend’s message to me today began, “let’s celebrate…”

What? His birthday. Online, in a chat room, as he explains.

What has changed in my life in recent weeks, I have recently been asked.
Everything. To put it bluntly. I’m now getting emails calling me a fellow prisoner.

I thought I was free.

My friend, to make this clear right away, has not committed any crime, has not been convicted of any crime and is therefore not serving any sentence in a state prison.
Nevertheless, a few sentences later in his mail the term “imprisonment” appears. Again as if I was part of it.

The Aztec goddess “Coatlicue” (“The One with the Snake Skirt”): She embodies, it is said, the ambivalence between intimacy and autonomy. This can also be seen in the context of society as a whole.

It cannot be overlooked now: certain freedoms that were once taken for granted, are suddenly curtailed. Suppose there was a need for me to buy new jeans – difficult these days. The relevant shops are closed. Sure, I would still get some pants if I needed them. Probably none that I like, though. At my favourite café the doors are barricaded. Not even coffee to go. Kreuzberg in an artificial coma. An unfamiliar picture.

Since gatherings of more than two people are prohibited in Berlin, I only meet friends individually. At least that intensifies the conversation. I had to cancel seminars. For a visit to my practice you now need a good reason. Many things must now be solved by telephone.
Hardly anything still works as before. The present seems so new, you’d think it had just been invented.

I then called my friend to speak as a fellow prisoner about his and my imprisonment.
“Been out for a long time today”, he explains and reports on an extended walk. Between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. he had walked from Kreuzberg to the eastern outskirts of Berlin. “Walked fast, got far. Wonderful in the sun. I saw my city with new eyes.”
I hear joy in his voice and I notice, “On the loose, if I understand you correctly.”

I know people who take social distancing very seriously. For example, a young couple from Spain lives in the house next door. They haven’t left their shared apartment for about three weeks. Letters and parcels as well as food deliveries have to remain outside the apartment door for 24 hours as a quarantine measure. They communicate with neighbours by calling through the closed door. Only when the hallway is empty do they move the deliveries in.
The real prison these days is fear. Am I imprisoned by fear? I would deny it. I think it’s likely that I will be infected with the new virus in the near future. I am not afraid of that. I am more concerned about the loss of individual freedom of movement and the dismantling of democratic rights. We will soon know how justified this concern is.

As uncomfortable as social distancing may seem. I have no serious problem with it. In fact, suddenly people I know only by sight greet me from afar. And as they greet, they smile. In the past, they almost ran over me, stomped past me without a greeting, without looking at me, and they didn’t smile either.
The (almost) standstill in the mechanics of the city creates a whole new, unusual freedom. Sounds probably strange, maybe also not very empathetic, because people suffer from the current viral consequences.
But while things are currently getting tight in some areas, for example in your own home, when the ceiling slowly falls on your head, new rooms are opening up at the same time. Even if they are thought spaces.
What do I want? What do I need? What do I enjoy? What do I love? What frightens me? What gives me courage? What gives me joy? How can I find fulfilment?
The slowing down of the world almost automatically generates a concentration on essential questions. The fog of distraction lifts. Answers become visible.
I too wandered through the city today. Explorations in the new space of silence. In some faces I believed to read findings.
What does life mean to me?, I thought.

Is happiness standing at the foot of a mountain asking, “Shall I come up to you?
The mountain answers: Stay where you are! I’m coming down to you!

Even if nobody can say exactly what life actually is – I feel we have every reason to kneel before it.

Yours – Otmar Jenner

P.S. Dear readers, English is not my mother tongue. If you find serious mistakes in the wording of an article, please let me know (oj@otmarjenner.de).

#otmarjenner #corona #covid 19 #SARS-CoV-2 #energyhealing #healing #happiness #heal #healingvibes #energy #spirituality #meditation #spiritual #chakras  #goodvibes #selflove #psychic #yoga #energybites #instagood #metaphysical #awakening #spiritualhealing #positiveenergy #energyhealer #consciousliving #consciousness #healingprocess #justhealing #compassion #forgiveness #guidance