“It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgments concerning them”
My hands looked like an old jaded fishing net. But moisturiser was the least of my worries. The French government had stayed up late playing games with freedom and liberty and all those nice words the Fifth Republic was founded on. During their three a.m. therapy session for governments-with-no-clue-how-to-handle-a pandemic they had decided to ban cycling and, if that wasn’t enough, forbid anyone travelling more than one kilometre from home. Lack of sleep makes you do crazy things. We’ve all been there.
And where had all this Lego come from? It was everywhere. And in the spaces in-between. Like string theory. Swedish building bricks of pain interacting with the fabric of my electromagnetic field, flashing in and out of existence every time I stood on them. Everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously. Red bricks were quarks, yellow were muons. You’d need a Large Hadron Collider to clean this mess up. How long can the virus remain contagious on reinforced plastic shipped in from Scandinavia?
“Alice,” I said, as I drank coffee and she pretended to tidy her toys away. “If I’m not standing on this Lego, is it really here?”
“Does it hurt when you don’t stand on it?”
“No,” I said, as I removed a yellow muon from my foot.
“Not hurt,” she said, “not there.”
Maybe she would go on like this forever, locked in a billion-to-one long-shot, fixing my mental biases with pearls of observational wisdom for the rest of my days. If only life were that kind.
There was a star adjustment, a planet skipped on its orbit, a meteorite crashed into an alien lake, the Nasdaq wiped out lives in a micro second and the world ticked on.
There was structure on day three. Homeschool started with a geography lesson.
“Alice, can you stick a pin in Iceland?”
She could. And said it was very hot there.
“Hot?” I said, questioning my hypothalamus.
“Yes,” she said. “The sun breaks the ice. It’s very hot now.”
Quarantine, a global pandemic, megalomaniacs ruling the world, and climate change.
It’s tough being nearly four.
We did our happiness diary to offset some C02. Alice was happy about seeing the neighbour’s dog (no sign of the elderly owner), the idea of painting and playing hide-and-seek before bed, but not using the bed to hide in, because that would defeat the purpose.
My phone was silent.
There was a morning routine in the Old World. Hazy memories. Apocalypse Mommy would drop Alice off at school, I would pick her up. Every morning before she left for school she would recite a mantra, a magical pep-pill to keep the doubts away. Not in the sacred Sanskrit way, more in the Carol Dweck Mindset way.
“Be strong, be funny, be courageous, be kind.”
The words weren’t in order of importance, they just sounded better that way. Something about strong and weak syllables and how the stress of one might mitigate the second. But their meaning was clear. And if Alice could do those four things, every day, no amount of quarantine (or whatever her future threw at her) would beat her resolve.
We went into the garden and did the bleep test, seventeen sprint drills, the 400-metres and thirty burpies.
The neighbours looked on. Horrified.
Level twenty-six. Feel the burn.
Alice said she was tired. “Can I have some water?”
I’m not a tyrant. I said yes.
We went back inside and wrote letters, threw paint at the wall and taught Alice that she should say ‘not easy’ instead of ‘difficult’.
It’s not easy being a teacher.
It’s not easy being a father. Sure is fun though.