Julia Baird on finding light in the dark: 'Coronavirus will leave a massive psychic scar'
Everything is on the periphery of the coronavirus at the moment. From where we are eating (home) to where we are socialising (home) and where we spend all of our time now (the internet, mostly), it is all dictated by the pandemic. So it has already been noted – numerous times – that Julia Baird’s book on how to cope with tough times could not have been more prescient.
But I will note it again here, because you can’t talk about the book (or anything, really) without referencing coronavirus.
Phosphorescence – subtitled On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark – began to germinate when Baird was going through a particularly brutal heartbreak a few years ago and speaking with her counsellor about how to see a way through. A few years later Baird was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer that could have killed her, which involved numerous operations and months at home. With two young children, Baird writes, her world “narrowed to a slit”.
But through it, she learned how to persevere. Not how to do something as twee as “flourish” during one of the toughest times in her life, but how to just keep putting one foot in front of the other. As we collectively feel the world as we know it shifting under our feet, from worrying about the mortality of our parents, and ourselves, to losing jobs it did not occur to us two months ago could be lost, there are a lot of us who need to hear how to simply make it through the day.
“If someone said to me when I got diagnosed, ‘Just go and sit under a tree and do some breathing’ – you know, we don’t do violence anymore, but you would want to punch them in that face. [This book] is really not meant to be that idea,” she says over the phone (face-to-face interviews are not considered essential work).
Baird mentions the Stockdale paradox, based on the experience of an American soldier who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for years and who survived it not by convincing himself it would be over soon, but by facing the reality of how terrible it was. Baird says you should be aware of the “crappy and brutal” situation you find yourself in.
“But you don’t lose the faith that ultimately you will prevail, and that ultimately we will come out of it. The tide will turn,” she says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, don’t worry, the world’s not that bad’. It’s, ‘Yeah, it is serious, serious stuff we have to deal with now in terms of global peril, let alone climate change and the future of the planet – and we have got a lot of work to do’. And to get through it, you’ve got to work out what makes you strong and tap into that.
“Everyone has their own thing,” she continues. “For me it was pockets of calm and stillness, and prayer or meditation, and getting into the ocean. It doesn’t mean the days aren’t dark. It doesn’t mean there aren’t times where you totally despair and struggle to even have a grain of hope. It just means that you are deliberately pursuing things that give you strength, instead of thinking [that things] are serendipitously falling apart.”
The meticulous research throughout Phosphorescence is typical of Baird, who is a host of ABC’s The Drum and the author of the internationally renowned biography Victoria: The Queen. She cites studies into the mental effects of blue space such as ocean and sky; forest bathing in Japan; storm chasing and philosophy. She references stoicism, with Descartes’ explanation of rainbows threaded through her own experiences. Even without a global health pandemic to ground it, it is a stunning book.
Some of the pillars she recommends include a more deliberate way of living, and getting out into nature. She writes about the importance of feeling small, stepping away from our phones and looking outwards, away from ourselves; and the joy of having lower expectations.
But while it’s full of strategies that could certainly help when you’ve lost your job and are not allowed to hug your mother or have dinner with your friends, some of them feel impossible right now.
A new hypervigilance has developed for a lot of us, as we track every development of the coronavirus on our phones, minute by minute. When we’re not entranced by the news, our phones also carry all of our loved ones. How can we possibly put down our screens when it feels like we are watching the world end on them? Then talking about the world ending with our mates?
“You cannot avoid the internet right now,” Baird concedes. “It’s like a pipeline for the outside world … We need information, and we’re not entirely sure who to believe – and people keep contradicting themselves. So we’re doing all these mental gymnastics every time we hop on.”
But there are benefits too. “There’s a lot of community and beautiful stuff happening online as well. This reminds us that for the first time in centuries we’re really facing a common threat globally. And it’s amazing to watch people respond to that.
“This will [leave] a massive psychic scar. It’s a huge death toll, there will be rage at negligence, at lack of foresight, at incompetence. I don’t know what can come from that – but I’ve never seen people act online the way they are acting now.”
Related: From gripping sagas to personal essays: Australian books for the coronavirus lockdown
Baird chose the title to allude not to the brilliance of light, but the process of storing it for gradual release. “I don’t mean for people to light up and be sparkly; it’s not [about being] covered in glitter and sequins,” she says. “For a long time, phosphorescent things take in the light of the sun, right? And then they emit that very slowly for a long time afterwards.”
Baird writes about losing her appetite and not being able to sleep after a heartbreak, and calling her counsellor in tears saying she did not know how she was going to get through.
He told her he had once said the same thing to his mentor, who slapped him, and said, “It is now that everything you have been given in your life matters; this is what you draw on. Your parents, your friends, your work, your books – everything you have ever been told, everything you have ever learned, this is when you use that.”
“I was trying to share that sense as well,” Baird says. “It’s not ‘how do you leap and bound after serious trauma?’ It’s ‘how do you keep putting one foot after the other, or at least just moving your toes’.”
Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark is out now via Fourth Estate/Harper Collins ($32.99; $19.99 as eBook)
