Cheshbon Lockdown
I was given a notebook a while back with the title “The Art of Switching Off. A journal to help you put down your phone and pick up your pen”. This week I decided to dust it off and begin using it, and what I found myself writing was a ‘cheshbon lockdown’ - an accounting, or self examination, of the time we have so far spent in lockdown. The blessings, the difficulties, the surprises, the things that I have valued, the things I won’t miss. It’s a bittersweet list, as it has been/still is a bittersweet experience for many of us to live in relative isolation.
A cheshbon nefesh is normally something we should be doing during the High Holy Days, an accounting of what we have done right and wrong, what we should have done and what we want to change during a whole year of living. Time in lockdown has been condensed and it feels like we have lived a lot more than 10 weeks, since the end of March. And so, as the rhythm of society is slowly changing around us for good and worse, now is a good time to do a ‘cheshbon lockdown’, an accounting of our lives in the past months. You don’t need a lovely journal to write it in, but writing it down is important, and sharing it with those who you have been in lockdown with, whether online or in your house.
The other aspect of a cheshbon is the need to act on our ‘accounting’. To make real changes to behaviours or issues. And society at large has been making a form of a ‘cheshbon lockdown’, in the growing awareness of the inequalities and injustices that have been exposed by the lockdown: the poverty, the number of people from a BAME background who have been ill or died, the number of BAME care and key workers who have died. How many of us have not been clapping on a Thursday night, to show our appreciation for key workers and care workers, especially in care homes? And yet as one care worker said; ‘ I can’t eat clapping, we can’t pay with rainbows’. The lack of proper pay for care workers and the dangerous circumstances that they have to work in has crystallised into a call for a Real Living Wage 4 Care Workers.
If we take no action, our cheshbon lockdown is just a list. If you want to learn more, listen to care workers on Thursdays at 7pm for the next three weeks here (https://www.facebook.com/CitizensUK/).