Nearly a Year

I’m nearing the twelve-month mark in this phase of my writing. Friday, March 13, 2020 was my first daily post: COVID-19, Boundless Way Zen Temple and Blogging. The night before, the Temple Leadership Council (TLC) had met and decided that we would not have any more in-person meditation sessions ‘for at least two weeks’ after our meditation the next morning. We were scrambling to put together an on-line meditation for that Sunday. We thought we were exercising an excess of caution—two weeks seemed like a long time. But looking back, we were incredibly naïve.

I suppose we are always naïve about the future. Our assumption is that the future will be an extension of the past—that what comes tomorrow will be a development of what is here today. We spend our time evaluating what has happened and making plans based on some version of that repeating itself. This examination and reflection of the past can be useful and is often helpful making plans and carrying out projects. But large asteroids, new viruses, and other unexpected occurrences are also a part of what happens. We go for a routine visit to the doctor and find out we have a major illness. We get a cough and fever and our COVID test comes back positive. We slip on the ice and twist our knee and can’t walk for months.

Life is both somewhat predictable and wildly contingent. The web of mutuality that supports us also ties us to each other and to everything in mutual dependence. We cannot be fully prepared for what is to come. We may be captain of our own ship but the wind and the weather, the icebergs and the other ships on the sea (both friends and pirates) are all beyond our control.

‘Unprecedented’ is the word that was thrown around a lot in March and April. Eventually we began to refer to the ‘new normal’ or the ‘new abnormal.’ What was unthinkable slowly became our daily life. Now, as the vaccine roll-out continues at a vigorous pace, we are all beginning to think what life will look like when we can get beyond this phase.

Much has been lost. Over five hundred thousand lives just in the United States alone. Countless businesses and millions of jobs are gone and will not return. Old habits of gathering and socializing have been interrupted. Which will return? How will we be different? What will be familiar? We can’t know.

Our best bet is flexibility and clear intention. As our nation slowly moves back to some semblance of normalcy, how do we not fall into reckless eagerness while avoiding unnecessary caution? Even now some states have removed COVID related restrictions. Will the people in those states be responsive to the information of viral spread and adjust their behavior accordingly or will resuming ‘normal interaction’ too fast lead to another wave of infections?

Politics and culture wars still rage on, severely impacting our capacity to work together in meeting this ongoing health crisis. Our inability to talk with each other across the political divide is an ongoing crises too. How will we reweave our country? Perhaps the whole notion of ‘reweaving’ is incorrect. Our nation has always contained sharp and violently defended divides of privilege based on geographies and birth and skin color. Perhaps this current polarization is the necessary step to address the lies of white supremacy and the only way to move toward a more just and truly inclusive society.

Meanwhile, kudos to the Biden administration for leading by both example and coordinating efforts in rolling out the vaccine. Now the challenge is to continue with clear intention to move toward opening up while remaining sensitive to the permutations and unexpected events that will surely arise.