Stay At Home But Please Keep Travelling.
Living and working in your own four walls — that’s great, isn’t it? You don’t have to stress in the morning about being in the office on time, you can organize your day and workplace flexibly, even walk around in pajamas if need be, who cares? The main thing is to get the job done.
Your flat becomes your workplace, you practically live in the office. Privacy and profession become increasingly blurred, concentration and motivation are lost in constant, trivial distractions. The self-discipline to be consistent and focused becomes a daily challenge, the emotional and spatial awkwardness becomes more and more overwhelming — and in all that, you feel so ridiculous and ungrateful.
How are we dealing with wandering a desert that doesn’t even let us dig our toes into the hot sand in order to feel that we’re having both feet grounded?
In the third part of mapping the first miles on my academical journey, I will sketch in words one specific defiance of the safari through the silent, sandy academic hills & valleys — one that counts for many other in these fields, one that was most probably not an explicit part of the contract we signed and yet is an inevitable challenge to face in the actual times.
The question is: What is it like to rub your eyes and blink — but not because of blinding sunbeams through swirls of dust, but much rather due to the constant flickering of monitors that suddenly enclose every single aspect of our professional lives, of our odyssey, on a few square inches?
Exploring this a bit further is to acknowledge the rocks that initially seem to be all over the already scarce landscape, moving on to changing the perspective on these boulders to ultimately pinpoint the sources of water & life — of WellBeing — that are, eventually, scattered all over that scenery and maybe not even as scarce as we might apprehend.
Life goes on — if there’s a stable internet connection.
Just as in these strange times there has never been a diploma presentation for the successful completion of my last hunt for the next academic title (please note the intended cynicism, which may still resonate here and there in the coming lines), let alone a celebration, just as I received this diploma with the coveted “MA” after the “BA” and my surname as a PDF attachment to a short-tempered, almost disappointingly unpretentious e-mail at an equally unspectacular time, I also received my employment contract, which is supposed to be the starting signal for the next title safari.
The subsequent impression of “Oh, that’s it already?” is immediately followed by “And now what?”
In every video conference — our only possible medium of communication — my supervisor comes across as very human, down-to-earth and cordial, and at the same time competent and interested. I am sure I have hit the jackpot. Even if I’ve never seen her in person; even if I can’t meet her in real life even once in the next six months.
What could possibly go wrong? I have what I wanted. Do I?
The e-mails from the university rectorate, which are supposed to remind us — students and staff — of the still precarious pandemic situation, reach us at intervals of a few days and tirelessly urge us to stay at home. “Home office” — a word that increasingly seems like the opposite of “work-life balance” — is becoming a mantra, the perceived (un)word of the year, a curse and a blessing at the same time.
Although there is a pro forma introduction to the — deserted and ghostly-looking — premises and infrastructure of the institute, one’s own presence is not actually desired anywhere. “Here you have your jobs, but please stay as far away as possible and just be glad that you don’t have any system-relevant professions.” That’s how the credo reads between the lines. And that’s how it feels.
As if it wasn’t enough of a challenge to know the color of the map that draws the landscape that will be the one to wander in the next years is of a mostly deep, rusty yellow — now it seems that all that scenery is also haunted by a threatening omnipresence called Covid19.
At the Institute, in our own office, where we are tolerated at most as staff members, but by no means wanted, we meet almost no one, room capacities are unmistakably reduced, contingent and controlled, every contact with colleagues, no matter how sporadic and distant, is required to be recorded systematically.
I feel like I’m in a strange, involuntary game of hide-and-seek that goes on for far too long — in which everyone else is not a sometimes playful travel companion but inexplicably and involuntarily turned into a bandit lying in ambush behind every possible dune.
Like all my colleagues, I follow the stay-at-home rule as far as possible and am only at the institute when a change of scenery becomes so necessary that concentration and productivity at home are out of the question. Interaction is not desired and virtually non-existent, conversations take place exclusively in video conferences, coffee breaks are invariably spent alone. My only regular contact person is the secretary of the work area, an incredibly kind and helpful soul whose encounters make me feel, without being able or willing to resist, a kind of silent gratitude for her mere presence.
Luxury problems, I admonish myself. It will be all right, I think. That’s just the way it is at the moment, it could be much worse, I tell myself. But people need other people. Wanderers like us need companions. And you can’t scold a feeling away.
We are all in the same caravan. With masks & distance, of course.
Since the beginning of my employment as a research assistant coincides with the appointment of my supervisor’s new employment, the team in which I will be integrated consists of exactly two people at the beginning: Me and my supervisor or superior, who is filling a new chair at the institute — and even that, for the time being, only on paper, as she is still tied to her home city both logistically and institutionally.
So, like me, she is in a kind of transitional phase — between two worlds, personally and professionally. Both of us (still) have little idea of the structures and procedures of the institution we are committed to, both of us have to find ourselves and each other in the whole.
Somehow, we are in the same boat — or perhaps, to stay with the initial metaphor, a caravan.
A caravan that is several hundred kilometres long and separated in the middle by a national border, where a dangerous virus is raging that makes everyone hold their breath, drifting on uneven ground into new territories, under the flag of an institution that is struggling for its credibility and recognition and at the same time must offer safe havens.
Spread those wings & fly.
What if in all of that, I try force a plot twist that will empower me? One that changes my perspective on the inevitable in order to take it as my advantage rather than my destiny?
There is a pandemic raging out there. We are forced to stay at home and work remotely. That’s not gonna change, even if every warning message from the trailblazers is raking the fear, even if every reminding shoutout of them to stay the hell away from them and eachother pokes that already lingering loneliness.
So what about thinking of the opportunity of working on a distanc, eexclusively through monitors and via Internet, as the chance to fly high?
What if it allows and asks us to be falcons — lifting up in the hot airs, loudlessly swaying above that dangerous scenery that is still to be our trail to face, persistently continuing the journey… only that it, for now, will be a few miles higher from the ground?
The view from up there might give us a better and certainly safer overview of what we are dealing with and what we will be facing — now and in the near future. It allows us to spot the rocks scattered all over and strategically plan the best way through and over them. It takes us into warm thermal winds that might — once we dare to — lift us into higher spheres of understanding reality and challenges.
… if we trust these wings we were unexpectedly offered and immediately asked to use incessantly and spread them, to lift above the threatening grounds and continue our journeys, all together, silently, until it is safe & sound to sink down again, fold these strong sways back into hands — and fearlessly shaking them again. Finally.
Accepting and embracing that new ability widens the horizons: I know that someone is walking on the other side of the caravan. I know that it won’t get lost just like that, because I’m trudging alone and the trailblazers just go their way unnoticed.
In times when the desert is more than ever made up of online databases and communication takes place almost exclusively via virtual platforms, the nomads are probably stuck in their (home) offices behind closed doors and incessantly humming computers. Not only does the desert seem even more unreal than it did in the old days, but every meeting, no matter how sparse, seems like a mirage that should not be approached without misgivings. It is hardly surprising that one cannot find one’s caravan in all this, that one can hardly recognize a hand in front of the eyes — let alone the silent companions — in the sandstorm also known as “Covid19”.
But eventhough I miss the others who hike with me, the others who would have to find their way back with me when we are about to lose sight of each other, eventhough I miss the interpersonal, I can now sway up the lonely dunes I come past. And there, I meet the equally lonely ones who wander and explore there, those who doubt just as much, those who stand on unknown expanses just as I do. And they might spread those wings, too, and join in. And it feels good.
Gratitude, relief and connection quickly set in. Impressions and emotions that one would not necessarily have associated with this job before all this, impressions that don’t seem very professional or scientific. Impressions that are, however, so human.
We set up colloquia and team meetings, make contact with the people behind the closed office doors, get to know faces behind names and titles, discover researchers behind research, sense humanity behind professionalism. And are a little less alone, a little less lonely. Feel a little less stuck in the sand and a little more discovering, find some direction and perspective again, exchange some of my self-doubt for confidence and connection.
