Enjoy The Pandemic!
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Cayucos, California
Enjoy the Pandemic!
If you’ve read past the title, then perhaps you can stomach the paradoxical, absurd, even counter-intuitive idea of enjoying this pandemic before it ends.
It will be over before we know it.
Naturally, I do not mean to minimize the pain of the Covid-19 experience.
Many are dying.
Others are losing friends or family.
Still others contract Covid but survive it only to suffer long lasting complications.
How, then, could the pandemic possibly be enjoyed?
Here are a few ways:
- Failure to embrace this unique experience could deprive you of fully encountering its meaning. We are living through a once-in-a-lifetime event, eliciting terror around the world, motivating scientists to aggressively address viruses in novel ways, and reminding us all of the problem of human overpopulation.
- Despite its obviously threatening nature, or at least the international inconveniencing of millions, we have all been challenged to adapt. The adaptation itself offers immense insight into oneself and others.
- Many are appreciating unexpected benefits—family reunions, college students staying home, workers in major metropolitan areas moving back in with family, the proliferation of online learning and working.
- The world will never be the same. We’re watching the changes unfold in real time—the increased digitization of the world, the commonality of the human family, the vulnerability of which we so often deny, and more.
- The pandemic offers an unexpected chance to reflect upon, and to appreciate, the experience of life.
- The isolation associated with it invites unique opportunities for more general self-reflection. We have an opportunity to ask questions like “what cultural benefits have I taken for granted?” “who really matters to me?” or “what does my life mean?”
Most of us feel only fear, even horror—reactions encouraged by the mass media, the global political reaction, and even the breathtaking divisiveness associated with this global disease.
Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic necessarily provokes the entire range of possibly imaginable negative emotions—panic, loss, fear, dread.
And, yet, this IS our ERA.
We are living an experience to be studied by historians and scholars as long as our species survives.
Why not also consider it an opportunity for learning?
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