The unheard of, the unimaginable and the “this cannot be happening” has occurred and continues to occur. It seems like the Corona Virus, through some magical spell or curse, has transported our lives to Bill Murray’s Ground Hog Day. Every day the news is the same, our actions and behaviors seem the same, and our lives seem trapped in a boring morass of nothingness.
Gone are the trappings of our favorite sports, celebrity gossip, Le Bron interviews and other trivial pursuits. No one can gather to judge one another on what they drive, what they wear, where they vacation or what school their kids attend. All of us have been reduced to a very basic, but beautiful level. We are all just human beings.
Human beings that, up until two weeks ago, had built value systems based on an insatiable diet of activities, schedules, purchases, entertainment and frivolity. The big reveal is that so much of our life pursuits are now shown to be simply irrelevant when we are faced with an indiscriminate virus that threatens our safety, livelihood and mortality.
Conversations with friends and neighbors quickly went from “I can’t believe this is happening” to “ You know, I can’t remember the last time my family at dinner together three nights in a row.” Neighborhoods have been transported back to the 80’s with kids playing in the street and parents going for walks and sitting on the front porch waving at neighbors.
Yes, there are still some who desperately want to return to the busyness of life, but slowly and surely we are all acknowledging the bigger value of humanity over pursuits of individual habits, pleasures or consumption. You see it in all ages, the growing awareness of what has been lost in our personal relationships, family systems and communities while we were all so focused on individual achievement.
We had come to feel entitled and emboldened to pursue our personal goals, no matter how selfish they seemed, because we felt like we were winning by living 28 hours in 24 hours, by multi-tasking, and by scheduling every second of our day. We believed this was the best way to contribute to society, but we were wrong. The Corona Virus and the lock-down has confronted us with the inescapable truth that we were not winning, because we were not focused on our higher calling and greatest value. Our greatest value to humanity is how we serve the greater good, and isn’t it interesting that we only begin to recognize this when we are forced to stop the fury of our daily lives.
Some may view the lockdown as an attack on our freedom, but it’s really an opportunity to serve. In the course of being responsible and serving one another by observing the lock down, we realize that we are all the same – just human beings. This is the baseline of equality in human beings, when we acknowledge mentally and in action a uniform belief that we can serve humanity not by what we have and what we pursue, but by what we temporarily deny ourselves for the greater good. That in itself is the definition of Humanity.
This reveal highlights what had become the shallows of our person, community and way of life. Our lives will never be the same, nor our individual pursuits. We are learning that alone we are vulnerable, but together we are strong.
