It’s strange this feeling of suspended animation. When you don’t know what it is you are waiting for, but you find yourself waiting anyway. It’s like those few seconds before you get the answer to an important text which could change your life, or those last few days before an exam which you’ve been preparing for for so long that you no longer care whether you pass or you fail.

You just want it to be over; you want everything to resume. The problem is that for the first time in the last 70 years, many of us don’t know what exactly we want resumed.

It’s funny how time has stood still for these past two months. While I was baking, writing and being misunderstood on every communication platform known to man, our always fleeting spring has given way to his fierier sister. It crept up on us while we were busy learning how to knit scarves we won’t be able to wear till next year and gaining 10 kilos.

This week, amid the ongoing debate about who could and should have fed the poor animals at San Anton Gardens and why it is that we always manage to make the international news for the wrong reasons, Ryanair and the EU decided that we were going to have a summer season whether the COVID-19 virus liked it or not.

Even before this pandemic hit, what had become our version of normal? Is that really what we want resumed?

I’m not sure what exactly it is that they are planning to do given that you can’t exactly ask a virus to politely take its leave, but what I have certainly learnt from this experience is how much of a God complex so many people seem to have. We are so used to believing that we mould our own futures and that we are in control of everything that even now that possible death is knocking on our doors, we still insist on trying to exert dominance where we clearly have none.

Yes, we must think of the economy; yes, we must do what we can to stay afloat, but when did these things become more important than protecting lives? It’s bizarre how this virus has in many ways just brought out what people’s true values are. Through all this mess, there are still those pushing to profit while our eyes are tiredly looking in another direction.

Gaping wounds in what is left of our barren countryside keep being made bigger, roads keep being built like cancerous worms, beautiful, old houses are swallowed up whole by soulless concrete boxes you wouldn’t put your least favourite chicken in, and most recently, non-ironic discussions keep being had about whether or not we should give up our conservation areas to hunters.

I would like to think that this period will be followed by extensive soul-searching and a change for the better, but not believing that anything is wrong with you is not exactly known to be fertile ground for change.

Through all the Zoom discussions with friends and the tiring meetings which seem to take twice the energy a normal meeting did with far less being achieved in terms of communication, I have often wondered how this will end and what my place is in the country which I was born in but which many times seems foreign to me.

Even before this pandemic hit, what had become our version of normal? Is that really what we want resumed? There should be nothing normal about shady dealings, women dying crushed by developers’ greed and journalists being blown up with impunity.

Here’s to not resuming.