Imagination Required

Days of rain have soaked the garden. The koi pond is full to the brim. Meanwhile, the pandemic lumbers on. Here in the Northeast our numbers of new infections, hospitalization rates and deaths continue to decline. But elsewhere in America, rates are rising. Nationally and globally we are seeing day after day of unprecedented numbers of new COVID-19 cases.

The social problem with this virus is that it is not virulent enough. Plagues of the past have infected and killed at much higher rates. Not that the terrible illness and deaths from this plague haven’t been enough, but it’s not like a quarter of the people I know have died. For many of us, our families and neighbors are reasonably safe and it takes an act of imagination to remember the danger we are all still in together. Whatever the numbers say, even here in the Northeast, we are in the middle of this battle against our invisible viral foe. But the pandemic continues and no one knows what the final tally will be. Some studies say that, even now, we have grossly undercounted the numbers of COVID-19 related  infections and deaths.

Now four months of battling COVID-19. Mid-March is when we closed the Temple and began radically altering our lives. This effort has touched almost every aspect of our lives. Yesterday we drove by a playground near where my grandson lives. It’s a wonderfully creative and inviting urban park near where he lives. We took him there several times on some warm days last winter and he loved all the things he could touch and climb. He was also fascinated by the other small two-legged creatures who were exploring and playing as well. I expected we would spend a lot of time there once the warm weather came. Driving the playground yesterday, I felt how distant that dream was.

Our new normal is donning masks (not for him yet, though I suppose at some point he will want his own mask so he can be like the grownups around him) and carefully avoiding people we meet on the sidewalk. The three of us, Melissa, me and our grandson, walk down to the corner and sit on his neighbor’s lawn, behind their chain-link fence to keep us a safe distance from the sidewalk. We watch the cars and trucks and pedestrians go by. He is delighted by the whoosh and flash of the moving objects. Anything with wheels, from his toy train to the rumbling dump trucks, enchants him. He will sit in our laps and watch contentedly for long periods. Yesterday he even he even began to exclaim something that sounded a lot like ‘Wow!’ when an especially loud or large truck swept by.

Our grandson doesn’t mind the pandemic. He doesn’t know anything else. There is no playground. The neighbor children who live next door are not part of his world. Playgroups and gatherings of small people are not things he could even miss. For his generation, this will simply be part of the story—nothing out of the ordinary. ‘I stayed mostly at home the year I was one…or so they tell me.’

Sometimes I don’t mind the pandemic. Sitting outside on this lovely morning, it could be any year of the past four or five. The morning glory vines have once again summitted the pergola. Sounds of unseen birds and the falling water of our perpetual (as long as the electricity lasts) waterfall mingle with those of the passing cars driven by people beginning to resuming their external daily activities.

But imagination is still required. Unseen danger surrounds us. I guess this is part of being an adult—knowing that the world is not limited to our immediate senses—that we do indeed have to be care full. It has always been this way. We all know that when we turn the dial on the front of the stove that the gas and the flame and the heat come next—all of which are fine for boiling water and frying eggs, but are disastrous for touching. We know danger and avoid it without thinking, except from time-to-time realizing that we need to make sure to pass on these survival tips to the smaller ones who have not yet internalized the knowledge and cares that they will and must carry.

The fullness of life is undiminished by all of this. Limitations and danger are not the problem of life, they are life itself. I have never been able to jump over tall buildings and have never suffered a moment because of this lack of capacity. Acting freely within limitation is the open possibility at every moment. Let’s continue to hold onto our freedom as we act wisely to move through these ever-changing circumstances.

Personal Practice – As you move through your day, can you appreciate the freedom you have to do whatever you are doing? To be exactly where you are and to be feeling exactly what you’re feeling? You can’t sense it directly because this fundamental freedom cannot be conceived or objectified. Life itself lives us—beyond our calculations, worries and urgencies. See if you can catch a glimpse of this larger freedom. Today.