Resilience: How to Thrive during a Second-Wave Lockdown

There is a "second-wave" of COVID-19 cases in Victoria, Australia, which triggered a 6-week lockdown.

The recent boom in cases (albeit much smaller in numbers compared to our American counterparts) has forced the hand of the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, to keep us under quarantine. This second-wave of quarantine is personally more mentally taxing than the first; considering how much hope I had for Australia to keep their numbers at bay before the second semester of university starts. [For our Global North folks, our academic calendar starts at the start of the year.]

I live in the Melbourne CBD, which is under the lockdown. I know some postcodes are not but I take the lockdown restrictions very seriously. I usually would not go out of my apartment for 2 weeks at a time, making sure to check on my health and consume my vitamin-D to make sure that I do not have a deficiency. The last thing that you want is getting into trouble because you do not get enough sun in a day. But, as a person who stays indoors for most of the day, this was not that much different from the last time I went into lockdown, or even my daily routine pre-lockdown.

I even challenged myself as to how long I can stay in my apartment block before I needed to get new supplies. I prepared for this by stocking up for an entire month, with canned and frozen food alike (and the additional fresh vegetables that I could consume during the first week), and I got to 6 weeks. So, do I think that this second lockdown would be a breeze for me? No, because it was a very depressing challenge and I would not recommend doing it to anyone. It's very isolating, even with the zoom calls with university friends and tuning into classes online.

Are there any lessons that I could take with me into my 6-week lockdown?

So far? Yes. The quarantine has been going well, with the occasional visit to the grocery store a hop and a skip away from my apartment's lobby. It is the only human contact I get, albeit through a layer of plexiglass. That was the first lesson for me: to actually try and get that occasional human contact. I thought I was more of an introvert before this quarantine hit.

But the lockdown also changed a couple of things in my daily routine. I planned myself to come out of this pandemic healthier and much better off mentally than before. Have I failed in some of the days during the first wave of lockdown? Yes, I have. There were days that I felt like crap and could not see myself living much further along than probably 2035. Some people might lack context on that but: climate change. My climate anxiety has gotten worse after the Siberian wild-fires. That was the most trying moment of my lockdown and COVID-19 life - not the pandemic itself or the looming economic crisis that is about to hit us all.

What I also quickly noticed, in my pursuit of getting better, was how fast endorphins actually burn out. That early morning intense ab exercise routine or that extra plank that you do can give you that extra kick, and maybe that shot of caffeine might help you to get through the day, but what really would help is not a quick burst of energy per day: it is resilience that gets you through the months long, often dragging, event that is this pandemic. I knew going into official lockdown and "studying from home" would mean that I finally get more hours in the day that I do not spend on commute to University, waiting for the trams that never seem to be on time, to tackle some things that I have always wanted to do.

Instead of using my free time to go and do that extra bit of workout so that I can look extra good coming out of this lockdown, I went more spiritual, deeper into my mental health. And just inhaled and exhaled, 10 minutes at a time, wishing that all living things in this universe would be happy, even if just for that one short second in their lives, to feel true bliss. That in the midst of a pandemic, where countless of lives are loss, that we would ultimately find happiness, in this life or in another.

Meditation. That was how I got through the first-wave. And hopefully, it will get me through my second one. It kept me feeling good, by helping me confront my fears and channel it into compassion and empathy for the rest of the world. I knew that I was the happiest when I recognised that I could perceive my world as going much slower if I just slowed the world down, even for just 10 minutes, tune out all of the noise in my life and focus on the life within.

Do I think that meditation is for everyone? Absolutely not. But, it helped me to build up my resilience.

Finding what it was that was the source for my resilience was the key. Meditation helped me find the calmness of the ocean, by focusing my path on one that was more positive instead of the chaos of the wild-fires that disturbed me so much. During my first lockdown, I found that even though I recognised that I needed to keep myself under lockdown because of pre-symptomatic spreading of the virus, and so I did.

But, I did not thrive for the first couple of weeks. I was disturbed by all of the things that were happening around me. The ignorance that I saw greatly affected me to the point of me wanting to shout out off of rooftops saying: I might be Asian and I might look Chinese, but please do not attack me just because I look like one for I am not even a Chinese national... also, don't be such a xenophobe and attack on my fellow international students.

And, so, I resorted to something that I knew would keep me resilient and conscious at the very same time - which I narrowed down to two things: learning new things and meditating. And the latter sounded like a habit that I could develop while I decided upon what it was that I wanted to learn.

And meditate, I did.