Una Mullally: Out of the pandemic, into a whole new age of flux

If the extremity of the pandemic era was full of echoes of the past, then the emergence from it feels loaded with them, too. The outburst of celebration and liberation the elongated St Patrick’s Day holiday created and facilitated was the first time a sort of normality felt like it was taking root, rather than the previous moments that felt like breaks between lockdowns, or windows of brief opportunity through which we could seize, re-create and perform versions of “normal” life.

Like so many aspects of this strange time, as we try to find our feet again, qualities of the past often land in unexpected ways. On Wednesday night I strolled into the courtyard of Collins Barracks in Dublin to attend the opening night of the St Patrick’s Day “festival quarter” there. With music stages and Spiegeltents, and bar queues and food stalls, lights sweeping the walls and the feeling of bass from good quality soundsystems, it all transported me both back and forward to a familiar setting. I knew where I was going, where I had planned to be, but the feeling was still surprising: oh, I’m at a festival, a proper mini pop-up festival, with all the accoutrements – the smell of hotdogs grilling, the slosh of beer from plastic pint containers, the roar of an overzealous security guard trying to move a group of people from a venue at capacity, the scratch of wristbands and slam of portaloo doors. It was brilliant. Of course, similar events have happened during the pandemic, but this time it did not feel as though the pandemic context was visible or tangible.

In a funny way, this new world feels a lot like an old world, not one before the pandemic but one right before the 2008 crash

In Dublin city centre, the old-new presence of large numbers of tourists snapped things back into a version of its past. As I cycled through town on Friday morning, broken glass from the previous day’s festivities blanketing the paths and streets like unmelted hailstones, a version of the city that had not existed for a couple of years came into focus. It shouldn’t take the arrival of thousands of tourists to make things feel lively again, but given how the city orientates around tourism, that’s what’s happening.

Relief and ennui

We’re in an odd state of emergence. Every day another message lands on my phone about another friend who has contracted Covid. This wave is different and inevitable. Mask-wearing has evaporated, people are socialising more and more, this round of omicron is making a lot of people sick, but, for the most part – thanks to the less dangerous strain and the high level of vaccinations – the consequences don’t appear as dire for the vast majority of people. Many people have checked out of keeping abreast of pandemic-related news, and not just because a horrific war in Europe has overtaken it. The idea that the pandemic ends when people gradually decide they can live with a certain amount of risk has proven, for now, to be true.

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And within all of this, there’s a strange mix of enthusiasm and tiredness around. I don’t think that a lot of people have fully considered the level of wear and tear we’ve all experienced (some, for whom the pandemic was about grief, much more than others). The gap to rest between the pandemic “ending” and things “getting back” appears blurry and elusive. We are carrying with us two years of grind, of loss, of trauma, of an evaporation of purpose, of ennui or an understanding of a need to reset but often a lack of energy to bring that shift into being.

Sense of foreboding

In a funny way, this new world feels a lot like an old world, not one before the pandemic but one right before the 2008 crash. Time has taken on a different quality, crawling for two years and now speeding. The jitteriness, the feeling of uncertainty, the sense that something’s going to give, the spiralling cost of everything, the difficulties of keeping afloat, the hedonism, the residue of burnout, the desire to switch things up, the compartmentalisation of a sense of foreboding, the brief moments of respite, the grit required to keep going. The thing about pauses is that they open us up to their need. When they conclude, it’s not necessarily the sense of busyness we want to return to, but rather rest and balance.

It feels as though the cards the pandemic tossed in the air have yet to land

If part of the pandemic was about having time to connect with others, this moment feels quite fragmented, as though everyone is picking up the pieces of their lives, and wondering how to reconstruct a jigsaw that now has a changed pattern. As the political system missteps and flounders to address the cost of living (unnoticed by those on high wages) and the housing crisis escalates, and people are forced to emigrate not because they can’t get a job – there are staffing shortages everywhere – but because they can’t afford rent, it feels as though the cards the pandemic tossed in the air have yet to land. The shock of a brutal war has jolted us all, as we rue how anyone ever had the audacity to ask the question: what’s going to happen next?

Predictability has gone out the window. Change is one thing, flux is another. If we conceived that emerging from the pandemic would feel grounding, it appears instead that we are living in the age of the unmoored.