I get that the Coronavirus pandemic poses unique and difficult challenges for many people, and that certain inequalities are popping up in sharp relief as a result of the crisis. Still, I’m seeing a lot of Silver Lining to this particular global challenge.
Some thoughts:
*Viruses are ancient. They may be our oldest ancestors, predating bacteria and the other life forms we take for granted in our current environments. Could these elders be trying to tell us something?
*A neuroscientist on the radio this morning invited us to start saying “physical distancing” and “distance socializing” rather than “social distancing,” encouraging us to keep socializing while we maintain physical distance. I’m down! I had a “dinner” party at my “house” the other night on my Zoom videoconferencing platform. I’ve also FaceTimed and spoken with more friends from my youth and childhood this past week than I have in the past three months. Because people aren’t quite so busy, aren’t spread quite so thin, we get to be in more contact. I know everyone doesn’t have access to these wonderful technologies, but for those of us who do, we can coordinate a lot of distance socializing while we meet out civic responsibility to maintain physical distance.
*The UK government has asked certain manufacturers, including Rolls Royce and Jaguar Land Rover, to build ventilators. Some will completely switch their production lines to produce the medical devices. The country expects to need a lot more ventilators than it currently has to address the needs of those who become infected with coronavirus, and they’re hoping that domestic manufacture can meet the shortage.
In the 1980s, I remember learning about a British nuclear missile manufacturer whose personnel voted to shift from making weaponry to making high-tech, state-of-the-art prosthetic devices for amputees.
Wouldn’t it be amazing to see more of these kinds of movements away from the manufacture of consumer luxury items or instruments of death to products that help people instead?
*My daughter said the other day that what makes this time a unique and precious opportunity is the reality of global, focused attention. COVID-19 has been found on every continent except Antarctica. Around the world, we are all sharing this moment of deep mystery. How damaging and far-reaching will this virus be? How long will physical distancing and sheltering in place last? When will the peak number of people infected with coronavirus and needing medical care hit? We’re all focused on how to stay healthy, how to keep our loved ones and our communities safe and intact. This kind of shared attention is unusual and powerful.
*Some of us also have the opportunity now to do some things that we usually don’t have time for. One of my daughters calls them CoronaProjects. She painted a desk the other day in a beautiful blue and orange pattern. Now she’s painting a bedroom upstairs. A friend in New York is curing a salmon, a “someday” project that he finally has the time to try. And a local friend has made a personal commitment to mail a drawing or painting out every day to a faraway loved one, a beautiful way to stay connected during Sheltering In Place.
*Sheltering In Place has effectively pressed a Cosmic Pause Button. We are so lucky to have this forced experiment! Can telecommuting become a viable option for many? When my son’s girlfriend learned that she would be telecommuting for the next two months, she immediately gained two hours every day with the deletion of her daily BART commute. What a boon to earn so much time, our most precious commodity!
Many people in my world commute daily for 90 minutes to two hours in each direction; now they are working from home. What if that becomes their new normal? Already, with fewer people driving, the air smells cleaner; birdsong is more prevalent, easier to hear; traffic has dramatically eased. Does this suggest a way forward, for our society to be gentler on people, gentler on the environment? Astrologer and activist Caroline Casey has said that our current situation means that the jackboot of industrialization has been lifted for a moment off the throat of the natural world. Nature gets to exhale, catch her breath.
A friend told me this story recently, which may suggest some of the possibilities available to us now: A family had a goldfish named Swimmy. Swimmy lived in a small rectangular container, and would perpetually swim around the tank’s perimeter. His (Her?) family moved into a home with a large, contained pond, and they put Swimmy in the pond. For quite a while, Swimmy continued to swim in the same old, habitual rectangle, even though there was now lots more space available. Eventually, Swimmy copped to the new available freedom, and began to swim all around his (her?) new environs.
Maybe we can swim outside of our habitual metaphysical rectangles too.
*This may be a good time to reconsider the viability of bioregionalism.
*I acknowledge that not everyone can work from home. Nurses, janitors, and zookeepers, among many others, all need to do their jobs in person. But everyone benefits from diminished traffic. And maybe we should think about compensating more generously those jobs that don’t allow telecommuting.
*Our inequalities emerge starkly right now, yes, but there are also examples of humane ways forward. Italy has suspended mortgage payments, evictions, rent, and utilities bills during the crisis. California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an order asking banks to halt foreclosures and evictions through the end of May; the White House has ordered suspension of all foreclosures for households that have a Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgage until the end of April. Could we ease up on all of this, create situations, relationships, policies founded on acknowledging basic moral imperatives, so that no one has to live with the threat of losing housing again, ever? I mean, if we can find a way to make it work for six weeks, for ten weeks, can we find a way to make it work in perpetuity?
*I realize that not collecting rents is a nuanced issue, that some small-scale landlords rely on rents as their only or major source of income. They need to be taken care of too.
*The stock market is totally in the toilet, and life goes on. Can we develop a broad spectrum of programs and initiatives based on human decency that may minimize profits but maximize human potential and thriving, environmental health and wellbeing?
*What a blessing to have running water, electricity, and gas coming to our homes as we shelter in place! Uncertainty and concern are part of this challenge, as they were during the fall wildfires in California, but having utilities that continue to reliably work feels like a welcome distinction.
*Sheltering in place, distance socializing, wearing gloves and masks in public—these are ways we can protect ourselves, but more importantly, our purpose here is to protect the collective, to prevent the virus from spreading so our most vulnerable are less likely to get sick. What We Do Matters. Praying for the health of others, meditating on global wellness, sending good vibes to all who are sick, caring about others, purposeful actions for the common good, for the planet and all its inhabitants—these things are Good Medicine for all of us. It feels like our task right now is to gather the medicine, to brew healing elixirs, figuratively speaking, for all.
*It’s a great time to be alive. Can we figure out, through open-minded experimentation, how the limitations we’re now living with can make us more free?
Here’s a link to a Washington Post article that uses animation to show how more people engaging in more behaviors that help to contain the virus is good for all of us. Best visual representation I’ve seen of why everybody needs to give a ding dong about all this:
And here’s a New York Times interview with a couple of Massachusetts epidemiologists who say that very simple, individual actions can have critically important, exponential effects. I especially like the tree diagram in the article, which illustrates how cutting a single “branch” of contact early on can result in far fewer infections:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/health/coronavirus-distancing-transmission.html