F: And this fear is a counter force to our natural drive towards a social life. I am also very curious to understand the consequences that this forced resistance to our innate community living will bring, especially to younger generations. This acquired suspicion towards the other can be intrinsically embedded in our minds even beyond the vaccine and this can have a strong impact on our well-being. The fear can unbalance our senses; it can volatise the meaning we give to our lives, and therefore profoundly change the way we see ourselves. I also find curious the coalescence of two bubbles. Christmas is approaching and we are all discussing and reflecting on the best ways to meet safely. How many bubbles can meet, and under which conditions? How to balance the extreme necessity of being together with the need to be in a safe space? This reflection can bring many tensions, conflicts, and frustrations. 14 Under these circumstances, walking has become the only safe way to be nearby my close family who are not part of my intimate safety pod. Walking has become an exercise of drawing parallel tunnels with our feet and minds. A tunnel that is distanced but intimate at the same time, a social proxy. When these two tunnels get close, there is a tension, a nervousness, a timid encounter, that can take ten thousand steps before a conversation begins to flow more naturally. Fear can be stronger and block a spontaneous conversation. Walking has then become a metric tool to recover meaningful social encounters, especially if long enough to allow for a truthful exercise of listening where conversations can go beyond practical aspects of life and step in the core realms.
14 Only on December 18th, 2020 did the Portuguese Government announce the precise guidelines for Christmas, which brought about high collective anxiety.
T: That is a beautiful if daunting metric metaphor: ten thousand steps to regain intimacy. As well as the fact that some tubes are not only side by side, but they are also attracted to each other. Yet, this social proxy does not resolve a fundamental tactile need we have of touching, hugging, kissing each other.
F: The magnetic attraction towards the other becomes more apparent when we become aware of the brain strength that is necessary to resist it. Our whole body, our sensorial and cognitive capacities must be re-geared to resist proximity, such is the strength of this innate drive.
T: It is important for me to listen to you talking about this, because I haven’t been able to be with my family or my old ‘hugging’ friends ever since the pandemic started. In my family there is always an enormous temptation for people to be really close to each other, it is a natural part of our family behaviour especially with kids, as I’m sure is the case with a lot of people. Taking ten thousand steps to regain something that vaguely resembles the intimacy one had pre-Covid is fascinating and worrying.
F: Still in relation to metrics, Miguel Torga writes: The man who flies measures the world in a different way. What is the perspective that I could take from Africa if I had walked it at the crab’s rhythm? The entire life would not be enough to mark in it half a dozen coordinates. But like this, in one glance I encompass the infinite grandeur of this feverish and sleepy body, at the same time naked and raped. A body where high hills and infinite mountain ranges become insignificant wrinkles and endless flowy rivers look like bloodless veins. Even the fact that I can look at this from ten thousand metres high, comfortably seated in a chair and with air conditioning, makes my observations more significant. I compare two realities: the one I belong to, almost angelical because so abstract, and the one down below, earthly, larval. (…) What denudation has to go through the European to return to the decency of the hut! 15 Just like for Torga, and contrary to the abstractness of the experience of flying that is increasingly difficult today, Covid-19 seems to have brought us back to the concreteness of the humble house and the humble details of life.
15 Miguel Torga, Diário XII . Coimbra, my translation. Coimbra, 1977, 25–26
T: Walking brings situated comprehension across multiple scales. Flying gives us a sense of scale that we can’t have with walking, but with walking we understand a certain set of scales that is simply invisible to the logic of flying. If walking is our slowest movement and flying the fastest, there is a speed spectrum that activates and deactivates all the scales in between. With flying increasingly distant, the hyperlocal dominates our imaginaries: we have new stories, memories, scents, temperatures, etc. This is a new way of measuring space that was dormant before.
F: Your relationship with your neighbourhood becomes your centre.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 41
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