A SENSE OF RELIEF AS LIFE RETURNS TO ‘NEW NORMAL’

THE end of the pandemic came without fanfare, without drama.

No family meeting called and addressed by the president, no public celebrations, few prayers of thankfulness, and even fewer messages to applaud the courage of a nation to survive such a struggle.

In families the occasion is marked merely with collecting and disposing of the many masks that litter homes. In neighbourhoods the end to this time of struggle is only marked with more guests invited to weddings and other events.

Faith communities mark it simply with higher numbers of worshippers attending in person. Citizens travelling abroad mark the occasion only with brief debates on whether they should run the risk that the new arrangements will not yet hold at border customs on arrival and departure.

Arguably, it is only a general sense of relief to feel free that permeates everyday conversations with which South Africans seem to observe the announcement last week that safety regulations had been repealed.

No matter the general agreement still held just weeks ago of a “new normal”, their relief for South Africans is also a sense that their lives will return to what they remember as the familiar normal prior to the pandemic.

Even if churches now also broadcast services online, campuses offer more online courses, office meetings and conferences make use of virtual formats, and political contests revolve around how the pandemic was handled, this sense of relief remains.

Not even the prominence and number of public and private interventions to resolve the adverse economic and social impact of the pandemic seem to interrupt the general sense of a return to a familiar past of relative peace and known challenges.

It is as if the sense of an uncertain and unfamiliar future that tormented our society abruptly vanished. Even philosophical projects to define and make sense of the pandemic and its aftermath as the start of a new epoch in the history of humanity seem to have slowed.

South Africa oscillates. Swinging between the pasts we remember and the futures we long for seems to be how we respond to this important ending in the life of a nation. As a social and societal dynamic such a response represents a “drama of endings”.

Read from a sociological perspective, how societies respond to the end of the pandemic can be seen as a drama of performances by citizens and institutions, and of the projects they undertake in response to a fragile situation.

It is a fragile situation because of familiar things that end, and new things that begin, with each of these transitions placing exceptional demands on citizens and the state. Differently put, a societal drama of endings deals with “continuities and discontinuities”.

This means that a society finds itself in a state of in-betweenness where some parts of life before the pandemic continue, while others are either reformed or disrupted. Such a place to be in is not a new experience for a society in transition, such as ours – people are familiar with continuous change.

What makes it more difficult is how central the phenomenon of crises is to the end of what is familiar, how non-linear the transition from endings to beginnings, and the intensity of decisions that people must consider. One still can be infected; the crisis remains close.

Some parts of life can be regained, while others are lost forever; which are which, one discovers haphazardly. In almost every next interaction, one must decide anew what is to be repeated, or not; an unending demand for decisions.