The Danish guy, we'll call him Liam, who lives in our compound has proven to be a goldmine of insights. I'm glad our paths crossed, quite literally, while doing endless laps of walking around confined spaces.  

On a positive note, my Achilles is healing rapidly and my walking step count is increasing a lot without so much pain.  But my body is still as stiff as ever from the walking and this is something that Liam echoed as well.  He is a big, tall muscular guy who can easily walk twice as fast as me and left me in the dust many times on the walks.  But on one such occasion we happened to both stop walking and actually chat.  He explained the reason why the bodies might be so stiff.   

"It's because my brain is angry,"  he said.   

Somewhat puzzled yet intrigued, I thought I might have an idea as to what he was talking about.

He continued:  "For two months they locked us in like caged animals and this did a number on our mental health.  Even this bullshit pass system  where we go out for 3 hours once a week, I decided it wasn't worth it.  I gave mine to someone else.  I am angry at what they are doing here and this has made my body exhausted."

I couldn't agree more.  There had to be a mind-body connection at work here and so I started digging up some sources to learn more

[One] cause of muscle tension is psychological tension. Psychological tension is any form of anxiety, frustration, sadness or anger that we develop as a result of our perceptions. For example, we may develop psychological tension as a result of our thoughts regarding our coworker (e.g. they’re lazy) or of us being stuck in traffic (“this shouldn’t happen"). Our automatic tendency to attach to these thoughts and take them seriously is what causes us psychological tension.   [Another] cause of muscle tension is environmental stressors and habits. For example, our sedentary lifestyles tend to exacerbate our physical pain because we aren’t giving our muscles a chance to expel the tension. Other habits such as poor posture, lack of sleep, drug use, unhealthy eating, and environmental pollution tend to increase the likelihood of us developing chronic muscle tension.

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Connecting the dots with this reading and also the conversation with Liam, I began to develop a thesis of my own.

The thesis goes something lke this:  the predominant thought during lockdon is quite simply, "this shouldn't happen".  For pages and pages already we've gone into why this is and how none of what's happening makes any sense.  None of us can see any reason for this so-called emergency.  It has long been proven by now that the Omicron variant is less potent than the flu.  This is not somebody's opinion, there is scientific research to back it up.  Yet we're locked down because of politics, as my wife says it's because one guy in senior leadership wants to keep his face.  Yet the tension comes from reconciling this irrationality with the fact that the lockdown is indeed happening and it causes a whole spinoff of other real emergencies.  An angry brain leads to stored tension.  Being confined to the house means a sedentary lifestyle by force.  This only worsens the problem.  Bad habits such as poor posture, lack of sleep, unhealthy eating, drinking alcohol, etc..  are exacerbated by the situation as we try to cope in any way we can.  This creates a cycle where, for example, poor sleep leads to more anxiety which leads to more unhealthy eating then more negative thoughts about how none of this should be happening, etc...

I think it's important not to skip or dismiss these mental health issues.  The damage done across the entire population has been nothing less than catastrophic.  And as you would expect, the authorities could care less about any of this.  They simply don't care.  Why would they?  Why should they?  The rules don't apply to the leaders anyway.

Add to the mix of all this, there is no shortage of well-meaning people who approach the last two month with the attitude of "you just have to accept this".  They go into their own psychology of gratitude and letting go, freeing the mind, using this time for meditation, helping out in the community, coming together with neighbors, etc..  These are great merits and much could be written about all that, but there's not point.  We should be asking instead why we aren't doing all those things normally and why does it take a lockdown to get us to talk to our  neighbors?

I've tried to be constructive about all this in my own way, but I focus on the tyranny and injustice of this lockdown.  These other people, as well meaning as they are, they ignore all that in the first place.  By accepting it they are complicit. 

And what really hits home is that if I don't leave China and choose to stay here for many years after, then I am also complicit in supporting this government.