The third lockdown is here, affecting the city of Kigali and several other districts, and whether we accept it or not, lockdowns do leave many feeling anxious and stressed but at the same time with a full understanding of the need to abide by health measures to prevent the further spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has literally grounded operations globally.
Even as we sit in this anxiety, anyone asking us "How we are” will highly likely receive the typical response "OK” in passing and this is the conversation I invite us all to have today. This OK answer is nothing but a mask we all wear for the world every day, the mask that says "I am fine” when it means "I am not”. Is trying to look strong in front of people in order to conceal our weakness not in itself the real weakness? This is a charade of life that has been in existence even before Covid-19 was here. It makes this a timely conversation since amidst a pandemic, things can get more complicated and yet, obviously, we all want to sail through successfully and be able to catch up with our friends, family, colleagues at the end of these turbulent times.
We are wired as polite humans and do not wish to burden our friends, family members, colleagues with complaints and tales of woe, but instead mask our feelings which if anything remains essentially meaningless and evasive, perhaps as the question of "how are you” itself can get. We claim to be OK even when are far from it, but embarrassed and not able to gut it out, suck it up or even walk it off.
How often are we checking on our friends during these hard times? How deeper are we searching beyond the "I am OK” answers to ascertain if our ‘strong’ friends, the ‘always managing’ friends are actually on a good track? And when we ask, are we really searching deep and honestly for the quality of their existence or is it part of those stereotypical salutations that we have trained ourselves to ask questions in passing just to open a phone call with? Are we increasingly becoming less adept, in various scales, at hiding our essential disinterest in ourselves and our social networks? Has honesty become faux among our circles of friends and colleagues?
This inquiry became of interest recently and I checked up some historical facts and found out that the practice of ‘wearing an OK mask for the world’ is something new that humanity has invented over time. In traditional days, the then anachronistic holdover from old superstitious times actually operated in the opposite way. Our great grandparents believed that responding that they were doing well, great, fantastic and any other responses alluding to the fact that one was on the upside trend had chance to invite disaster such as drawing to oneself bad witches or trickster fairies that would strike the self-satisfied humans into some form of doom.
Over time, humanity seems to be becoming more and more creative in creating our own faux realities. Evidently, there are some questions that we have conditioned ourselves to ask in particular ways (superficial) as well as respond in particular ways (with lies) in order to assumedly maintain our inner peace and avoid inviting our social networks into pity parties.
One of the critical problems we run ourselves into with the facades we create around our everyday realities is that we are forced to believe that we are actually OK, when we are not and we shy away from seeking the help we badly need at that particular point in time. We are conditioned by our own choices to believe that our hidden realities are actually true and functional and we are forced to live with it and happily show how well we are doing, even when it feels like a sword stuck in our downpipes.
This too shall pass…, sounds familiar? When it is something we have created and modified and still choose to keep working to modify the faux responses around real issues. We condemn the reality by masking it and in the end deny our same social networks the opportunity to pull us out of the deep pits we emotionally occasionally fall into. We block the love that is otherwise expected to come in and help in the healing and instead we deny ourselves the opportunity to see and live in the pure truth.
Travelling light (a phrase learnt from a friend recently) … is clearly a better way forward for us all. We need to unlearn being ugly condemners of our own realities and instead learn to seek help when we need it from our friends, families and colleagues. I am very well aware that trust is a component here but it seems also we see trust as the bigger issue because we are mainly preoccupied with hiding in false cocoons of self-denial.
Therefore, we are all encouraged to become better humans, as guided by our label ‘humankind’. The kind here compels us to be more compassionate with even our own daily struggles, well enough to want to share them and well enough to be able to seek help from our friends and honestly do the same to them in turn. We have to stop saying we are OK when we are not. I hope with this new perspective we can all sail easier and lighter through the lockdown and see stronger ourselves at the end of it. Let us learn to ask for help when we need it.
Dr. Malonza is a lecturer at the school of Architecture, University of Rwanda. An architect and urban designer with keen interest in the dialectical relations between Architecture and Society.