I think that the coronavirus will keep spreading and that it will lead us to a situation where we will be simultaneously afraid of it, and accustomed to its place in our daily lives. Moreover, our fear of the virus will have no impeding effect on our day-to-day functioning.
We can add the coronavirus to a long list of risks that we have learned to live with. Yet, we would be wise to learn how to observe a few rules that the coronavirus sends our way. Moreover, we can expect other crises to surface, and at each juncture we will have to adjust ourselves.
In the future, we will also look back at the coronavirus pandemic in a positive light, in that it served to align humanity’s relations more closely with nature’s interdependence and interconnectedness.
Firstly, it compelled us to consider how we were living our lives, and think of how we could renew and improve our relations.
Secondly, it slowed down the consumerist train we were riding, giving us room to differentiate between our life’s essentials and what we could do without.
Thirdly, it showed us clear examples of how nature restores itself when we calmed ourselves down for a few moments.
We are still in the midst of a major lesson in interdependence that this virus brings us, from the need to exercise mutual dependence in our respective localities—maintaining personal hygiene, wearing masks and upholding social distancing conditions—to witnessing our tight global interdependence in how the virus surfaced as an outbreak in one part of the world, and quickly spread to become a global pandemic.
I have spoken and written at length about crises being opportunities for us to seek better connection with each other, and that they serve to progress us to a state of balance with nature.
Fighting the coronavirus head on is futile. We will increasingly discover how viruses are impossible to fight. They are inside us. Our bodies have billions of viruses, and so there is no point in fighting our own bodies. We would thus be much wiser if we learned how to align ourselves—our thoughts and desires—to positively connect with other people and nature. Our bodies will then healthily support our aspirations to realize the fullest meaning of living as human beings, i.e., adjusting our attitudes to each other in order to match the tightening interdependent and interconnected conditions that nature sets for us. We will then experience life much more happily and healthily.
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