11 November 2020
For the last three weeks, these blogs have focused on acceptance, an idea some think essential to sobriety, abstinence, and recovery. In the weeks these blogs were written, the second wave of COVID-19 began. Many have expressed concern, anxiety, and anticipatory cabin-fever. In March 2020, when the virus emerged, Terry Waite wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph. Waite was held captive in Beirut for nearly five years (1,763 days) most of them in solitary captivity. Would Waite’s experience exacerbate his fears of COVID-19 lockdown, or would he have learned preparatory lessons? Mr. Waite expressed his answer in five parts.
1. The smallest gestures matter. Near the end of his captivity, Mr. Waite was moved from a solitary cell into one with three other captives. He had so serious a bronchial infection that he was unable to lie down, even to sleep. Sitting, day and night, back to the wall, another captive, American journalist Terry Anderson, stretched his own position in the cell as far as his chains allowed to place one of his hands atop one of Waite’s. Imagine the impact of such a gesture after five years of hatred and indifference. Mr. Waite has not forgotten that.
2. See and exploit each moment for its uniqueness. During the early stages of the lockdown, Mr. Waite’s family stayed in London. Waite remained at their country home in Suffolk, where he savoured the solitude for what it then offered: writing and thinking time.
3. Frame experience healthfully. When Mr. Waite wrote of his captivity, he framed it as a gift-giving time. While our imaginations fill in the gruesome details of captivity under Hezbollah, Waite chose to see that time differently. And he didn’t watch it from the comfort of his favourite armchair, he lived it. That gift was the knowledge that this solitude has all that he wished for in captivity; an opportunity that probably won’t arise again. Mr. Waite longed for the ability to write, probably as a means of understanding. During this lockdown, he’s writing.
4. Have faith. Mr. Waite was an Anglican and a Quaker and, as one of the latter, spent an hour in Internet-based silence, with other Quakers, in the week prior to writing; an experience he described as “…remarkably peaceful and healing.”
5. Have a routine. Simple: Wash-up, dress early, exercise, do something good, and something productive. Season when needed. This is acceptance. This is amor fati.
Dan Chalykoff facilitates two weekly voluntary group meetings, as well as private appointments, for SMART-based counselling services at danchalykoff@hotmail.com
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