A joy to run this Corona-meditation from mission-marketer (and UBI advocate) Phil Teer, one of A/UK’s constant friends.

Phil Teer: Stay Still

The morning is still. The air is clean. The sky is blue. Cars no longer hiss past my window, and I can hear waves down on the beach.

We are learning a new skill. How to stay completely still.

There is no rush hour, no crush on the train, no traffic jams and no fumes. We are all still.

The noise of the city has been stilled. The silence is a relief.

There are no planes in the sky and no yellow sliver of smog on the horizon. The planet heals quickly when we are still.

Markets fall. Growth stalls. The economy is inert. The infection rate is exponential.

This is a great time to be a virus. Once isolated in pockets, imprisoned by forests and jungles, they can now travel freely, through spaces cleared in the name of growth, hitching a ride on a conveyor belt of humans that traverses the planet, over and over again.

The conveyor is still. GDP is still. The only growth is plants. Filling the holes. Packing those wounds.

Fish swim in the clear waters of canals and rivers that were murky only yesterday. Animals venture down our streets. In a neat reversal, it is us who are being rewilded.

Cease fires have been called. Guns put aside. There is a kind of peace in the outside world. The fight is now inside us. The virus versus our antibodies. The only way to avoid the fight is to stay still. Go nowhere. If we move, we kill or die.

I wish I could still the anxiety when I venture out among other people. Pavements are minefields where the mines have legs and might explode if I get within two metres. Everyone judges and is judged. Photos are shared by people who were also out there.

But still, most people are good. Most people do not panic buy. Most people recognise that what is good for all, is good for one.

The media sensationalises the few at the extreme. The hoarders and the ignorers of rules. But most of us stay completely still. A truth is revealed. Most of us believe in the common good.

Most of us live in small spaces. Driven to distraction by bored children, we break for the parks and are judged by those who find it easy to stay still, living as they do in houses with more rooms than people and gardens for games and BBQs.

In The Plague, Camus wrote, “poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing. Thus, whereas plague with its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality amongst our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in men’s hearts.”

The greatest good is done by those who still go to work. Those who came from all over the world to work in our hospitals and care homes. Those who empty the bins and keep plagues of rats at bay. Those who serve the queues that line up outside the shops or get on their bikes and deliver pizza. Those who walk out into the world every day because they have a job to do. Those who walk into ICUs with inadequate protection, to knowingly inhale lethal air. Those who nurse us back to health or attend to our dying. Those who sit with the stricken until they are still. They are the best of us.

While professionals like us complain about Zoom and Teams, those who have little choice squeeze into work vans, shoulder to shoulder with mates, and go dig a hole so the internet keeps working.

The idea of a Universal Basic Income shifts from an unrealistic fantasy to a pragmatic solution. Support grows daily. The Pope and the FT are on board. Scotland says maybe soon. Spain considers a basic income. Not universal, but neither was suffrage at first.

Living does not have to be so precarious. We can eradicate financial insecurity forever by giving everyone a foundation of hard, solid cash to build their lives upon.

Our system is beautiful but frail. A distribution web that can deliver fruit from anywhere in the world to our homes, just in time to ripen. But just-in-time has been proven to be a glass web that shimmers in the sunshine but shatters when winds come. My veg box comes from a local farm and has been delivered without fail. A better system already exists within the broken one.

In the stillness we can see an alternative. One that is normally a blur outside the window of our high-speed lifestyle. A world in which we have time in abundance. Time to play and to create. Time to talk and take stock.

In lockdown, boredom turns quickly to creativity. With nowhere to go and no shops and no money, our imagination kicks in. We get baking. We sing songs and perform dance routines.

Yungblud plays a gig to a video wall of lockdowned fans, tweeting their love into an emoji mosh pit. A new medium is born.

A couple in New Zealand make figurines of politicians out of recycled household rubbish. A new art form is born.

The LA Getty Museum of Art challenges people to recreate their favourite artworks using three props they find around their house. A meme is born.

Our stillness fills the world with new ideas that are gifts we send out to encourage each other to stay still for longer.

Imagine we stayed still forever? We would fill the world with new ideas. An exponential curve of inspiration.

Crises were once linear. Nuclear annihilation, then AIDS, then mad cow, then SARS, then The Crash, then Ebola. Now they don’t wait in line—they all come at once. We have a health crisis inside an economic crisis inside an environmental crisis. Matryoshka dolls of grim existential threats.

You would think no-one could possibly deny that something is wrong with the way we do things? But still some deny. Stillness is communism to some. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s something new.

I step back from my window and click online. Arundhati Roy has published an essay called The Pandemic is a Portal. She writes, “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.”

A friend shares a flyposting from Seattle: “We’re not going back to normal, we are creating a new one.”

The longer we stay still, the more alternatives we see.

Stay still.

"We are learning a new skill. How to stay completely still." Phil Teer on how something genuinely new is incubating, at the heart of the pandemic

Phil Teer: Stay Still