Lockdown notes 3/9/21
By: Louise Rutherford
Tags: Creative Writing, Meditation, Walking, Covid Diaries

Kereru love the quiet of the lockdown

Over the past year, I’ve been in the bubble of New Zealand. Outside in the rest of the world, ICUs are overrun and Covid ravages the world. Inside, I’ve been hugging my friends, getting my regular supply of toilet paper and going to work. Not any more. Delta, that sneaky weasel, has nosed its way in.

We’re in week three of lockdown. Or is it week two? Its hard to keep track of time. I have a daily rhythm, but its the same every single day of the week, or rather, it repeats every two days because during lockdown my child’s father and I have switched to a two days /two days child custody arrangement.

For two days I’m almost exclusively a mum; snuggling in bed in the morning. Cooking pikelets and chopping apple or carrot for morning tea. Biking or running or painting faces or doing jigsaw puzzles or collecting leaves to make perfume with until we both need to stare at Teen Titans Go! on the largest screen we have. Making slow cooked food. Going to bed early.

The other 2 days are the opposite. With no child around, I spend long periods of time attending zoom meetings or writing about information and data management in my pyjamas. Then I spend long periods of time making detailed drawings of items in the house, or reading popular non-fiction about neuroscience, physics and the nature of time. Its hard to reflect on the nature of time with a seven year old around — you’re too busy.

Across the valley, half the population of Karori are in the park getting their daily exercise. The other half are at home, making futile attempts to work while homeschooling their children.

I have been out for my daily walk. Now I’m at home. It’s very still in the external world these days, but there is a lot going on in my head. It is an opportunity to listen to all the long podcasts I’ve been putting off, read all the academic books I’ve been putting off, and do the time consuming solo introspective things that I sort of want to do, but need the enforced solitude and boredom of lockdown to force me to them. I like thinking, but I enjoy bonding over coffee too much to actually put it into practice much. Now there are fewer excuses.

I have discovered Lex Friedman’s podcast in lockdown. He is well known for his epically long episodes, apparently. I love it. A long talk gives his interviewees time to relax, and the conversation ranges from the psychology of long distance running to your parent’s relationship. Because he always chooses fascinating people to talk to, and because he is a compelling combination of deep knowledge, curiosity and self awareness, I feel like I’m a quiet third in a conversation between my two best friends, but my two best friends who just happen to be a world class artificial intelligence researcher and a Nobel prize winning neuroscientist. I listened to his conversation with Joscha Bach on my walk yesterday lunchtime. About what reality is, and about how far away we are from seeing it.

I had my headphones in, but you couldn’t see them from under my hood. It was 7 degrees, although in Wellington the wind chill takes the temperature down another few degrees. I had forgotten to bring my mask, so when people came along in the other direction, I pulled the zipper of my coat up over my mouth and crossed the street. I imagined them looking at me judgmentally, and then writing something on social media.

As I reached the crest of the hill where South Karori Road really turns from the suburbs into the country, Lex and Joscha were talking about waves on a beach, about how they aren’t actually ‘waves’; they are a combination of atoms that the interpretation engine in our brains parses as ‘waves’ because that’s a way we can understand them. Our brains are doing regression, he said. There are too many atoms to count or understand, so we are using a mental model to simplify them, and that model is called a ‘wave’.

As I was standing stock still so as not to scare the Kereru sitting on a branch only a metre away from me, Joscha Bach observed that people who use a lot of psychedelics end up overfitting — like how the brain is a meaning-making engine, and sometimes we make too much meaning, or the wrong meaning, or meaning when there isn’t any there.

We’re living in a dream-world, he said, and I had a flash of that moment in meditation where Sam Harris clicks his fingers and asks you to turn your attention upon itself and you discover that there is only emptiness — there is no ‘I’.

It’s empty sort of like a cave is empty; full of secret places to explore. A full emptiness.