Sufficient Unto the Day...

I have always had this sense that everything was going to be all right.

People accuse me of being too laid back, and I get that. I do not worry or panic about the things that normal people worry or panic about.

(as an aside - the things I DO worry about are weird as well. I worry about what the "best" thing to have for supper is. I worry about how to get 8 hours of sleep. I worry about which shirt to wear today. I worry about whether strangers think I am attractive... But when I get cancer, when there is a pandemic, when the money runs out... no worry at all)

I would love to be able to claim this is the result of faith - that I let go and let God - or put it at the feet of Jesus or some other trite and meaningless convention of faith. But it has nothing to do with faith in that sense.

I have been thinking in the midst of this pandemic and I guess the way my mind works is basically this:

I will probably be dead tomorrow. How do I have the best day ever today?

That is it in a nutshell.

So it totally explains my worries and lack of worry. I really do not care about tomorrow at any deep level. I really do not care about yesterday at any deep level. If it is happening today, then it means everything to me.

Now, as I said, this is not classical faith the way it has evolved through theology - but I wonder if it is closer to the way Jesus intended us to see the world. Is this in fact what "being religious" means?

As you can imagine, I am weathering the pandemic fairly well because I am focused almost completely on today. And today is absolutely no different from any other day in my life - except for some minor variations, and every day has minor variations, so it does not surprise me.

And because of that, I would like to make the case for ancient spiritual wisdom actually giving us the tools we need in times like this.

In my own tradition there is this whole speech Jesus gives where he says that birds of the air and flowers of the field do not worry about tomorrow - and yet they have magnificent lives. He follows this up by saying "sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof" (in the old fashioned way of our bibles) or perhaps if he was speaking to us now he might say - "there is enough to worry about right in front of you - for my sake - let it go."

And the other big spiritual gurus were pretty clear on the same thing... from Buddha who essentially said that concentrating on the here and now is the path to salvation through all the rest of them.

Live in the present. Give thanks for the present. Celebrate the goodness you see.

That is faith in action.

It is hard to do. But it is not impossible. And I guess that is where I hope we can get to. An ability to wake up and see the snow falling outside our windows, where we are locked away from the pandemic, and think - wow, pretty - and go make some toast.

The moment is all that there is. Make the most of it. That is what Jesus would have done.

The Good of the Many - Leads to Loneliness

I grew up watching Star Trek.

Well - obsessing over Star Trek.

I suppose I am lucky that I chose a show that reflected a deep sense of moral value back into the world. Or perhaps I was already someone who held the values of love and inclusion close to my heart and so I loved the show because I saw myself in it.

Nonetheless - I have lived 50 years with the idea of  "do no harm" and that the good of the many outweighs the good of the one. I have lived my life believing that race does not matter and that interfering with the way another person saw the world was wrong.

So the measures being taken to flatten the curve already make sense to me.

I also have been reading about how the same things happened in the early 1900's around the Spanish Flu. The Universities and schools shut down, for example. And there are undoubtedly many other examples.

The real difference I suppose is ease of travel. Back in the day we had to wait weeks till the ship crossed the ocean. Now we are there this afternoon.

I will not pretend that I mind social isolation. I am not a gregariously needy person when it comes to social interaction. I prefer writing on my laptop or playing skyrim.

But my role in life is to interact and care for those who are vulnerable and who need attention. And to offer a spiritual dimension to the reality I witness. Being the op ed type of journalist who tries to delve deep into issues that others find impermanent - like art and faith and society - sometimes means taking a different view of things.

So here is a thought that I think you might all agree with but that not many are putting out there.

The world is a lonely place.

It has been becoming lonelier and lonelier as we spend more time at home, on the internet, as we move away from family and become a global citizens.

We already struggle to find meaningful connection. And this is going to make it worse.

I fear, not the loss of 20% of the population or whatever this pandemic may do in the short term (which, I do not dismiss, it is sad and scary - but reality) What I truly fear is the aftermath.

9/11 changed the world forever. In subtle but interesting ways. We became a nanny state where agreement with the majority became the greatest social value.

It changed us.

Looking back sociologists will be able to point to that one event and say that society was moving in one direction and the twin towers altered the trajectory of social development.

Somehow 9/11 also changed science. I do not know if you remember, but before that we could clone people, we could build space stations, teleportation was right around the corner...

A decade later people turned against science and now we cannot even convince people that the planet is getting warmer or that they should wash their hands.

So what will the outcome of the Corona virus Pandemic be? How much will this change who we are?

That is my fear. That perhaps social contact and the idea of togetherness is at risk. Perhaps we will come to see people who want to be around other people as abnormal. Perhaps we will no longer have group events, concerts, sports...

I don't know. Things never happen in obvious ways because human beings are bizarrely unpredictable. Witness the fact of toilet paper shortages with a disease that does not alter your "regularity" at all.

So I might be wrong about "what" will be forever changed. Still, I worry that something will be forever changed - and not for the better.

I guess my hope is that we continue to value the good things - love, peace, hope, joy and that we fight to remember to keep those things alive even as the world shifts beneath our feet.