Since social activity has been reduced to domestic spaces, I have been outside my home very little, just to replinesh our kitchen with the food the family loves most.
In days gone by, while fulfilling this mission, I visited Costco. To my naive surprise I stumbled upon a world of masked beings, avoiding even eye contact, sniffing out tension and fear.
The little skin I had uncovered froze. This microscopic phenomenon has put us all in check‼It seems like a science fiction story, which has torn our social fabric. I felt that we lost part of the human appearance, our identity. When hiding our faces we cannot perceive the spirit of the people, the laughter, the anger, it is like facing a robotic world. For starters, you don’t trust anyone anymore. They bombard us day and night that we must treat everyone, including our loved ones, at a distance and with caution. Each of us can be the bearer of the death threat that keeps us all confined.
Listening to a person through the mask, is in many occasions a difficult endeavor. We are used to reading lips and facial expressions while our interlocutor speaks and communicates, and although we try to fine tune and listen well, the message does not come so clear. And what about non-listeners, how will they manage? It is all quite traumatic!
We know very well that we cannot live in isolation. We need each other. We have the tendency (sometimes even inadvertently) of judging our peers. When we judge and criticize we don’t feel compassion or love, such primordial feelings of our being. When we hurt others, we are hurting ourselves, because although it is difficult to understand we are all connected.
Sometimes I think that the Covid-19 Pandemia was not transmitted by any bat or created in any laboratory, but by nature itself, which has imposed a mandatory withdrawal to make us look deep inside of us in order to purify and reinvent ourselves, thus giving way to becoming a better person. It is when we unveil ourselves collectively that we show the world the evolution of a superior human race.
“Every next level of your life
will demand a different you ”
Dr. Steven Guillan
CREDITS
Pictures x Cecilia Herrera
English Translation x Julio Abislaiman
The reaction to mask/no mask has been troubling. What at first felt like “we’re all in this together” has devolved into “us” vs. “them”; i.e. mask vs. no mask. In the past week, as different states have started to open, I’m finding that people change their path as they see masked-me coming – moving much further away than the recommended 6 feet of social distancing. When I greet them, I’m most often ignored. I’ll continue wearing a mask in public, greeting people, and using my “eye smile” generously. We truly are all in this together, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.