While COVID-19 rages unabated, many countries are adopting total lockdowns as an emergency protocol aimed to combat the spread of the virus.
In Malaysia, the government opted for the Movement Control Order (MCO), which is sometimes referred to as the “Malaysian partial lockdown”.
Either way, people are instructed but to stay home. Especially medical frontliners, who battle the virus on the ground and head-on, are used to convey the message to the slow-responding public.
Their plea is: “We stay here (in hospitals, clinics and other medical establishments, i.e., at work) for you, you stay home for us.”
Breaching stay-home notices is viewed as an offence and the offenders may be charged in court.
All of a sudden, staying home and away from others became everything. Such became the key to staying healthy – and probably alive. Nobody saw it coming that our future – yet the future of humanity – will depend one day exclusively on the home and on people’s staying within its ambit.
Without warning, the future of essentially everything started depending either on staying away from everything, or on modifying everything at once extensively and dramatically.
People’s chasing of everything suddenly came to a grinding halt, and started hinging upon isolation and doing virtually nothing.
Many people are still in shock. Life may never be the same again. As though not knowing what has really hit them, people are crossing swords with this new reality and are trying to absorb the impact of its many repercussions for their personal lives and life in general.
What is Home?
On the face of it, staying only at home for a couple of weeks and being full-time with family members, should not be such a bad idea – overlooking for a moment the unfortunate economic consequences of the global lockdown.
The latter nevertheless is mitigated somewhat by the fact that many people still can work from home. By the way, at the moment there are about three billion people under lockdown worldwide.
There should be nothing wrong with staying round-the-clock at home and optimizing it as one of the best heavenly gifts to man. A home is not a physical place per se.
Rather, it is a metaphysical dimension where human feelings, hopes, memories and dreams are created and kept.
Home is where the heart is, where mutual love and appreciation thrive, where the most loved ones are, and where our true life stories and identities reside.