“No kapa haka tonight, whānau.”

The words jarred me. Nearly every Wednesday for two years I’d been ending my night in a beautiful wharenui at Unitec’s Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae. This simple weekly ritual – a rising tide of voices coming together to sing waiata after our night school language classes – had saved me so many times before, a potent balm when other parts of my world were crumbling.

I came to the marae that night in search of that feeling. Exactly one week prior, the first signs of the impending collapse of the live music industry were coming to light. The hairline cracks had widened so quickly that, in the space of seven days, it seemed like everyone I worked with – close friends, most of them – was staring down the barrel of #canceleverything and zero income as far as the eye could see. It was early days and our industry was alone in this, our concerns financial only. But trauma is trauma, and I knew what I needed: voices lifted in unison. Shared space, shared intention, the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It is apparent, now, that our ability to come together in such ways is going to be off the table for a while. Even once we’re released from sheltering-in-place, once we’re allowed outside of our household bubbles, the act of gathering in groups is likely to be under various forms of siege for months or years to come. Some communities, where the imperative to exist collectively is structured into daily life, will feel the impact of this immediately; for others, it will come as an awakening.

We’re discovering how much we need to physically be with other people at the exact moment we’re being told we can’t have it.

At 35, the only other reference I have for shared experience on a global scale is 9/11. At the age of 17, my world stopped at the edges of the North American continent, so as far as I was concerned, the “whole world” was feeling the same trauma. I’d never felt shared grief, shock and uncertainty on a scale that large. In my corner of the globe, we responded as a collective: first gathering in prayer, vigil and moments of silence, and later in anti-war protests that filled the streets with – again – a rising chorus of voices. We processed it all together, in the company not only of our friends and family, but in the presence of strangers with whom we suddenly shared common ground.

When words fail us, it is our mere physical presence with one another that gives us solace

In the days following the early waves of Covid-19 news – when it was still just private-sector responses, minor travel restrictions, event caps – life was a blur of human contact. My community’s reaction to that shock and uncertainty was to process it with each other. We spent hours in friends’ lounges, ruminating through happy hours, taking long walks, and drinking endless amounts of coffee while strategising our survival over café tables. There were entire conversations punctuated only by the shaking of heads, there were so many hugs. Proof that when words fail us, it is our mere physical presence with one another that gives us solace.

Fast-forward 48 hours, past the border closure and nationwide mandate to shelter in place, and suddenly all those measures of comfort were off the cards.

When I speak with Mohamed Hassan about what isolation means for him, the first thing he reflects on is the irony of a community so brave that local mosques kept their doors open in the face of terror threats only to have them forced shut by Covid-19. He’d travelled to Christchurch in early March ahead of the one-year anniversary of the terror attacks. “When I spoke to people down there,” Mohamed recounts, “they were saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what happens, we’re not going to stop coming together and we’re not going to stop worshipping and we’re not going to stop building this community together.’ And two weeks later, all these mosques are being closed down, not just here but all across the world.”

The ban on public gatherings strikes at the very heart of Islamic life, which – like many religions – “is very deliberately laid out as communal activities,” he says. And daily prayer, the anchor around which Islamic life revolves, is only ever performed alone as a last resort. He explains that there is a very specific imperative to pray in a group and in a mosque, before adding, “That communal sense of worship is very much at the heart of how we understand our religion, and also how we understand the way our societies are structured.”

Faced with curtailing the spread of Covid-19, Muslim leaders worldwide are grappling with the question of how to reconcile a moral imperative to be together in the face of a public health imperative to stay apart. “Muslims around the world,” muses Mohamed, “they're having to figure out what happens now that we don't have these mosques, we don’t have these centres where we can connect to one another, where we can see each other regularly. And it isn’t really anything that we’ve had to come across before,” at least not as a global community. The questions that leaders are asking, Mohamed says, are big ones: “Is it right to close a mosque in these times, is it right to tell people not to come in for Friday prayers, which are fundamentally a part of our beliefs?”

“I don’t know if people are going to be able to come up with other ways of being able to fill those spaces or make these connections with one another.”

Sense of belonging is a human psychological need right up there with food and shelter. We innately seek community and connection with others, and it has tangible outcomes on our mental and physical health. As neuroscientist James Coan commented recently in The New Yorker, “Our brains have learned from brutal evolutionary lessons that social isolation is a death sentence.” This isn’t really news; neither is the knowledge that sharing a room feels very different from sharing a screen, although we’re not always able to articulate why. The task we’re confronted with now is how to give our brains the sense of connection they need – not simply for this moment, but for when we inevitably return to it in future.

To not be able to give them a hug ... it’s not the same

Millennia ago, our ancestors were bound together for material survival. These days we bind ourselves to others through work, worship and leisure – and for many, when these physical spaces shut down, the activity within them becomes impossible as we knew it. The closure of art spaces is heartbreakingly explored in another piece pulished on The Pantograph Punch by actors and theatre-makers; the absence of gym spaces, suspensions of sports teams and cancellations of competitions leave a similarly gaping void for many.

Like many coaches and trainers, Richie Hardcore had been modifying his Muay Thai kickboxing team’s training over the weeks leading up to the Level 4 alert to accommodate social distancing – no sparring, no sharing equipment, no contact drills. It was a way of eking out as much time as possible for the team to be together. Closing his club for the first time in two decades, while inevitable, still took an emotional toll on everyone. When you operate like family, the breakup of that unit is hard.

“I've had young people come in the gym and they’re going through breakups or their boyfriend’s being abusive to them or their girlfriend’s left them or just life is confusing for them, and they want to talk [to someone].” Team relationships are unique in that they breed a particular intimacy between people who don’t necessarily maintain contact outside of the gym. Does he think those kinds of conversations will happen outside of the face-to-face opportunities afforded by training together? “In my case, yes, but I think words on the screen through Instagram still don't carry the weight of touch, talk, connection… to not be able to give them a hug or punch them in the arm or give them a wry smile or laugh or dry the tears, it’s not the same, you know.”

*

Back at kura pō, on the night of no kapa haka, shared teatime also disappeared. Our programme coordinator sticks his head into our classroom to let us know that from now on we should each bring our own kai to eat ourselves. He apologises, and tells us it’s only temporary until all this Covid-19 stuff is over, “then we can all go back to being Māori again.”

For some Māori like Amy Bassett, the rhythms of daily life on her marae reflect the importance of the collective: “Whatever is happening, if it’s a tangi or a wedding or a wānanga, everything’s moving around that thing, so you’re always in service of something greater than yourself. Everyone has something to do and if you don’t have something to do, you’re almost set apart from everyone. Having a role to play gives you your mana in the place.”

The inability to carry out tangihanga – the rites for the dead – is a fraught and painful consequence of the Level 4 restrictions. Māori communities are grappling with how to rethink tikanga for one of the most important sets of cultural protocols in te ao Māori. In the Far North, this was a very early consideration at Bethany Edmunds’ marae, where whānau have been asked to modify tangihanga and “to be completely self-sufficient in these times.”

Most achingly, we haven’t figured out how to sit in silence with one another on the other side of a screen yet.

The notion of self-sufficiency in the face of the most acute human loss – death – is a pragmatic but wrenching one. One of my first thoughts when Aotearoa went into Level 4 lockdown was, “What happens when someone dies now?” I have grieved alone, an ocean away from anyone else who knew that extinguished life. Skype did not cut it. I have never wanted anything more than to be in the same physical space as other people who also shared the loss of this specific person.

The question lingers: to what degree can we feel the sense of belonging, like part of a greater whole, when we’re prohibited from being in the same room as anyone outside our ‘bubble’?

You’ve gotta admit, though, we’re trying. We’ve got online group workouts and virtual cocktail hours and Facebook Live church services, we’ve got endless Zoom conversations with friends and Twitch houseparties. There have never been more options available to conquer the distance between ourselves.

But they’re imperfect tools at best. They presuppose you have people you can call on, and that you’re comfortable doing so. The interactions are inorganic: only one person can speak at a time, there are no sidebar conversations naturally spinning off from the group. There are technical glitches: faces freeze, audio lags, people unintentionally talk over one another. These all seem like minor inconveniences but they add up quickly when the virtual is our sole source of human contact. Our brains, used to processing a wide array of contextual information drawn from surroundings and subtle changes in body language, are being asked to work exponentially harder in environments devoid of that context, and will find it harder to feel comfort. Virtual communication is a lifeline in these times: necessary, but not sufficient.

If the most intimate connections are the ones that don’t require words, then any tool reliant on words will always fall short.

That’s because the reason that all these online tools of communication were designed was to facilitate one thing and one thing only: conversation. The point of praying together, training together, cooking together, grieving together, is not to talk, although that’s often a byproduct; the point is to share experience in the presence of others. If the most intimate connections are the ones that don’t require words, then any tool reliant on words will always fall short. And most achingly, we haven’t figured out how to sit in silence with one another on the other side of a screen yet.

Richie likens it to what we eat: “We all need nourishing meals for our physical wellbeing, but often we get junk food because we’re in a hurry. And I think it’s the same with human connection. We feel a bit connected through Instagram and Facebook and Tinder and all these sorts of things, but they’re not really what we need. They can be a nice add-on to human connection, or augment it, but when it’s your sole source of nutrition, it’s not very good.”

The physiological reality to all of this is that when we are stressed or uncomfortable, we seek oxytocin (the ‘cuddle hormone’) release through human touch. And when we feel lonely, it’s a biological warning sign to seek out other people for survival. Under lockdown, self-isolation, shelter-in-place, alert Levels 2 through 4, whatever you want to call them, our go-to options to alleviate our discomfort are off the table. Compounding that feeling is the fact that we can’t really see the end of this thing; we don’t know how long we’re stuck with these feelings for.

In some ways it feels like a wake-up call, a glimpse down the extreme end of the path we’re currently on. More people in the world live alone than ever before. In cities, the closer we live to our neighbours, it seems, the less likely we are to actually know them. We’re all in constant communication on our devices but rarely do we actually hear each other’s voices on the Devices Formerly Known As Cell Phones. There’s even a recognised condition – hikikomori – of literal hermitude in favour of exclusively online interaction, originally identified in Japan but now being recognised around the globe.

Perhaps this is how we survive until we can gather again: ritual.

“We’ve finally isolated ourselves to the point that we have to sit in our houses by ourselves, and not be around others, we’ve finally atomised society to the nth degree,” Richie points out. “I think this is a real time for us to really stop and pause and look at the world that we’ve built.”

Mohamed sees things differently. “As Muslims, we’re having to take on these challenges together. We're going to be starting the month of Ramadan together, we're going to be ending it together. And all of us, as a globe, are going into this unknown territory together. There's a lot of comfort in that.”

Perhaps this is how we survive until we can gather again: ritual. Doing the same thing at the same time – apart, together. Common experience may not be the same as shared experience but it’s as close as we can get.

If we take anything away from this strange time, I hope it is this: that when these restrictions on human contact are eased, we remember how deeply we needed more than a screen. That we needed each other in the flesh. That we sought that flash of recognition in another person’s face: I see you, and we are in something together. That we are part of something bigger.

Writ large, this is precisely the notion that is required to carry us through.