You know, a pandemic always brings about horrible and heartbreaking things. Looking at the news is undeniably nerve wrecking. However, putting all of that aside, one thing that has been bothering me the most, is the lack of compassion people show towards one another. Even at this time when everyone is basically going through a tough time. Just by scrolling through people’s comments, you can feel how people are judging each other’s reactions. And for me, that kind of hits harder than the actual pandemic. Covid wasn’t brought onto us by ourselves, or well, that’s the general consensus. But the lack of compassion? Man, we are solely responsible for that. 

Take for example, travel. This has been banned, frowned upon, and it’s basically a taboo nowadays. If you scroll through the comments beneath an article related to travel, people will just ‘yell’ at anyone showing some brief inclination towards travelling to another country. Travel has been, rightly so, limited in order to control the spread. But that doesn’t mean that people haven’t been badly hit by this. The most obvious are those working in the tourism industry. But let’s also think about those people who in normal conditions, like to travel. Everyone travels for their own reason – some do it to spend some time with family or friends, some do it to fill their time, some to take nice photos, some to go shopping. Others do it as it helps them mentally. Just like a person enjoys going for a run, others need to wander around new places to feel inspired and stay sane. So accusing someone of showing the wish to travel is simply wrong.

This pandemic has become a common denominator of suffering around the globe. But people are experiencing it in totally different ways. The travel ban means that you are stuck on an island and you’re running out of new places to wander around. It also means that you haven’t seen two of your best friends for one and a half years. Limiting the amount of people that are allowed to gather, means that you couldn’t celebrate Christmas with all of your brothers and sisters, and you have only seen each other a few times in the past year. Doing freelance, non essential work means that you have been working from home for most of the year. The lack of human contact is now taking its toll. Having to deal with the stress of a pandemic has left you with no other choice but to put other stuff in your life on hold. Taking care of your mental health rather than diving into new, exciting chapters in your life, kind of felt like the most reasonable decision to take. 

But that’s just my story. Billions of others are going through different things. 

The banning of contact sports, means that one can’t play football with their friends to let off some steam at the end of the week. Closing all cinemas and theatres, means that we closed off that space where we are allowed to dream through performing arts. Closing off the schools means that now kids spend most of their day looking at a screen rather than mingling with their friends and being creative.

And that’s only a glimpse of what everyone is going through. If I had to talk about all the people who are losing their jobs, people who are dying, people who are faced with death everyday… the list of different kinds of suffering is endless. And the least we can do, is be there for each other and show compassion.

During the last few weeks, I have been dreaming about meeting up with people I haven’t seen in a very long while – cousins, aunts, old friends. It feels like my mind is trying to send the message that I should be meeting up with more people, get reacquainted with everyone. 

Everything we are going through goes against our human nature. We are not made to witness this much suffering. We are not supposed to be living closed behind doors, but we should be wandering and meeting up with new people and old friends. 

So please, please, please. If you’re going to write that hateful and judgmental comment on someone’s status, go watch a movie, paint something or bake some bread instead. Go for a walk, look at the sunset and send some positive vibes to that person you were going to judge. It’s the only thing we can do to survive this. 

Be kind. Always.