Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic. The birds are singing again, The sky is clearing, Spring is coming. Richard Hendrick
Then from those profound slumbers we awake in a dawn, not knowing who we are, being nobody, newly born, ready for anything, the brain emptied of that past which was life until then. Marcel Proust
When this ultimate crisis comes… when there is no way out – that is the very moment when we explode from within and the totally other emerges: the sudden surfacing of a strength, a security of unknown origin, welling up from beyond reason, rational expectation, and hope. Émile Durkheim
We are the missing ingredient in the solutions needed for all that ails us, if we but awaken to the nature of our own souls. Michael Meade
Emotional exhaustion follows fast on the footsteps of physical and mental depletion. Kilroy Oldster
Indescribable beauty is all around us. Showtimes will not be announced. Be on the lookout. Sama Akbar
Yet we only move through life through the process of change, reinvention and renewal, and so bravery is our quintessential rebel for pushing us past our own limiting beliefs and behaviors. Christine Evangelou
There is a cleansing from winter darkness the moment we sink our fingers into spring’s fresh earth. Toni Sorenson
A fair vision had welcomed him in this land of disease. J.R.R. Tolkien
Spring has come to the northern hemisphere, a time to cleans ourselves from winter’s darkness and prepare for the coming of flowers and longer daylight, the beauty that surrounds us always but that, in this particular season, even the most cynical and closed-off among us can hardly miss.
But this year many of us are looking beyond the blossoms and sunsets for other manifestations of cleansing, for some “fair vision” of what we might expect in a season of distancing and quarantine, how we can best help those on the front lines of supply and response, what we can do to preserve the sanity of ourselves and those family members we now see more often than we ever thought we might.
At the UN, we wait for some word that Security Council members grasp the broader peace and security dimensions of this threat, a virus that is already collapsing economies and will surely ravage those many thousands of displaced parents and children who have already lived more than enough trauma to last several lifetimes, a virus that is closing both borders and minds while opening opportunities for those who would exploit the current vulnerabilities for purposes of political or even military opportunism.
We also wait for some word that governments — which willfully disregarded health-related cautions and turned “prevention” into a cynical catch-phrase — can get us up to speed on response while resisting any and all authoritarian temptations.
And we wait to see what will emerge on the other side of what might be a longer season than many of us could have imagined, a season that will continue to exact a particularly heavy toll on those who keep our clinics and markets open and who can no longer rely on schools to keep their children safe and occupied while they do so.
Our failures, yet again, to heed the warnings of those entrusted with paying attention to worrisome trends and threats have created vulnerabilities beyond our grasp –now affecting broad swaths of the global population –with implications especially devastating for those homeless or otherwise displaced whose “viral burden” will simply be added to a long list of traumas that accrue from a life lived largely “in the elements.”
As a species, we seem to have trouble once again learning what we need to learn, tapping into the full resources of our souls, managing the emotional “exhaustion” which is a byproduct of too many frantic movements, desires and distractions, exhaustion which is ill suited to surviving the current restrictions that our own behavior has now rendered necessary. There is danger here that the “noise” enveloping our current levels of panic might keep us from one of the important tasks at hand — discerning how our lives just might have gone “off the rails” and how we might create a framework for more sustainable living once the metaphorical trains are up and running again.
There was an auto-repair commercial that ran a few years ago, the tag line for which was “you can pay me now, or pay me later.” In the most obvious sense, it was a call for drivers to change the oil and top off the fluids in their cars. But taken in a larger sense, it was a not-so-subtle reminder that being vigilant about “maintenance” reduces the burdens of expense down the line. If we care better for what we say we value – including each other – the costs associated with breakdown can be minimized.
What is true for automobiles is true for our politics and our economics, our climate and our supply chains, our health care systems and our food systems. We can pay now with our compassion, inner-strength and vigilance or, as we are experiencing in the present, pay later with our social isolation and empty market shelves, our overwhelmed health care resources and the needless deaths that inevitably follow in its wake.
In writing this, I resisted the temptation to simply fill the pages with quotations from people smarter than I will ever be, persons who have often survived deprivations far greater than mine and have reflected well on the powers that we still have at hand and that will be gravely tested in these coming months. Perhaps I should have done so. But the current context also requires some contemporary reflection on challenges and responsibilities: not only how we can get ventilators and toilet paper but how we can preserve what is left of our personal and collective sanity, sanity that will surely be a highly prized commodity as we “spring forward” into a period when most everything is likely to have changed — and which will require us to change along with it.
This “new dawn” is not, as some on our public airwaves are blithely suggesting, a return to our “normal lives,” but rather it is a call to display the “bravery” needed to firmly shift our “limiting beliefs and behaviors,” and to insist on leadership that can demonstrate the same. There are, indeed, fairer visions afoot in this “land of disease,” but they will be visions largely of our own making – and our own sustaining. This is a test of our collective mettle that we would do well not to fail.
The “cleansing” associated with the coming of spring will take longer than a season this time around and will require more than merely running our hands through the now-thawed earth. May we at least recognize that, for as long as it takes and whether we like it or not, the “missing ingredient” in getting beyond our current predicament lies largely within ourselves.
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