Children and cats are the true corona masters

First the children. I don't know whether it's the fact that the virus obviously doesn't hit children as hard, or whether they don't realise the seriousness of the situation, or whether they just enjoy not having to go to school anymore, but they're taking the lockdown surprisingly well.

Of course, as middle-class children with their own rooms, they are certainly not doing badly, but the carefree attitude with which they face the new situation gives me pause for thought. At first I was surprised, even irritated by their nonchalance, but now I think: is this perhaps the much-vaunted resilience? The ability to still be able to grin in the face of a crisis?

Conversely, you have to organise your life here and now in such a way that you enjoy living.

While I laboriously tried to explain to the youngest how to multiply by the reciprocal value, she in turn seemed to convey something fundamental to me: It's not about how we want to live when the world works again. You don't have to plan things for life afterwards. You don't have to bridge the quarantine wisely. You don't have to hope that it will be over at some point. Conversely, you have to arrange things here and now so that you enjoy living. Of course she didn't say that. But she lived it.

Friedrich Nietzsche has a beautiful thought according to which not every end is the goal. The end of a melody, for example, is not its goal; but nevertheless: if the melody has no end, it has not reached its goal. Nice, isn't it?

At that moment, I resolved to be happy about something every day for the rest of my life.

Become a cat!

The second realisation comes from my cats. No matter how you feel about these animals, you have to give them credit for one thing: they're calm. They just curl up with their paw over their face and fall asleep. They do nothing all day and are completely at peace with themselves. I realised after about two weeks, during which I had hardly got anything done and was completely stressed about it, that there was a secret message behind this: Be like us! Become a cat!

And indeed. We soon began to sleep longer. The alarm went off at 8.30am and we were in bed by 11pm. 9 hours of sleep, when was the last time I had that? At some point I started to lie down at lunchtime too. It wasn't an escape. No fatal closing my eyes to the suffering of the world. It was just what the cat had told me: if you sleep, you can't do anything wrong.