1. Perhaps the universe (or your god, whatever you may believe) has a way of reordering and remaking the world, especially when many things are distressed and distorted.
2. Is this moment in which we live one of those times that requires a remaking?
3. Oddly, as we live in a time when climate change (for whatever reason) has caused and continues to cause many natural disasters, China, which is a place (like the U.S.), which pollutes with thought only for monetary gain, must stop its economy to recover from a virus.
4. The pollution drops. Are those behind the masks breathing better now? Is their vision clearer? Can they see the mountains that were hidden in the smog?
5. We've reached a period of history when discrimination is making a comeback, when ideologies and policies are returning to a past I thought we'd outgrown and left behind, when making "other" a concrete symbol that we may use to bash others is quickly becoming normal.
6. Yet here is this virus that shows that in a moment, without warning, anyone - you, me, your wife, your child - regardless of race, color, or patriotism, can suddenly become discriminated against, segregated, stranded at home. Regardless of whiteness, Westernness, and wealth, you must breathe, and our air is contaminated. If Tom Hanks can't escape, who can?
7. Economies collapse. Does this matter? Does productivity and consumption matter when life hangs in limbo? While we are working our 12-hour days and busy on our tablets, reading our calendars and looking at our watches, the virus knows no time, and illness knows no time. We must stop. We must be at home, perhaps for days or weeks. We must learn again the value of time - real time, the time that matters. The immeasurable time of simply living and being.
8. As this virus closes schools, what happens as the institutions no longer parent, and parents must again be parents? With little ones at home, mothers and fathers must be mom and dad again, not the hamsters on the wheels of their jobs. Will this virus force us to focus on family once more? Will we remember what that feels like? Will we talk at dinner again?
9. As we are forced into social isolation at a time when loneliness has been cited as one of this society's greatest issues and concerns, will we begin to realize how vital our social network is - the real one, where you are hugged and kissed, held and touched? Will we realize how much meaning those gestures really have?
10. We've become so individualized, thinking only of ourselves - yet this virus will force us to think about others. The elderly in the nursing homes. Is that the right way to deal with those we once loved? This is bigger than a single individual or a single country - this is the world crying out, is it not? My fate may be your fate, or all our fates. This could happen to you.
11. Who do we depend upon when the sickness hits? The government? Family? Friends? Facebook? This requires an all-out sense of community and a societal response. We must all wash our hands; if only half the country does it, the other half will suffer, and that suffering will grow outward in torrential waves, splashing over nations like typhoons unstopped.
12. Could this virus be a blessing? Can we learn from this as our great-grandparents learned from the Spanish flu in 1918, or as our elders learned from the World Wars? Are we capable of learning, reorganizing, and doing the work to make the world a better place? (I'm not convinced we are.)
13. The Universe will have its way. What we make of it is up to us. Right now a virus is trying to tell us something. Will we stop to hear?
*These are not all my original thoughts, many came from a FB group on mythology that I follow. I wanted to put the ideas into something that made sense to me. (Cit. F. MORELLI)*
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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 647th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.
I have had many of those thoughts but not so concretely articulated. Nature has the final word on this. I am shocked and not surprised at the same time. We are seeing what really matters, and it is likely to get worse before it gets better.
ReplyDeleteMy investors group on FB has practically nothing but talk of markets falling, friends sharing memes of the sky falling. How tiresome!
ReplyDeleteI was curious about the empty shelves, so made an excuse to the Husband that we needed to get a few essentials last Friday. It was interesting to see what was left on the shelves. Still lots of canned beans but no bags of rice. Just like the news says, no TP and no bottled water. Not that we needed it. Lite spam and spicy spam were the only things left, as well as jars of pickled pig's feet and canned deviled ham. May common sense and courtesy prevail.
ReplyDelete