Responding to the Pandemic

I've had a sense that in the past weeks things have emotionally changed. I seem to get fewer silly videos through whatsapp, I receive and send out fewer e-mails and I know I'm reading the news about coronavirus less avidly. People that I talk to on the telephone appear to be just waiting for things to change. Initially there was a great feeling of the need to be creative and flexible with how life had to be managed. Everything presented as requiring a new approach and there felt to be an excitement in the anxiety of having to do things in a different way. I am sure that initially we all brought an energised enquiry into how the lockdown imposed itself onto our lives and this undoubtedly transferred into how we practised in the everyday. But now, having accepted the challenges and found solutions, we have become used to it and some aspects of life by their mundane nature have acquired a dullness. The novelty feels to have worn off and a new commonplace has inserted itself. 

In meeting this daily predictability I am reminded of something James Joyce wrote in Ulysses: 

Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. 

It may be that at the beginning of this situation we were open to meeting our own ghosts and giants and the stark differentness in our lives then would have opened us up to meeting ourselves but as things acquire a sense of ordinariness it is easy to stop that direct encounter as new habits and routines take over and dampen our feeling for enquiry. So it may well be that when we walk through our day-to-day, the self we now meet is just an ‘ordinary’ self, very likely to be all too familiar to us. Practice, however, offers a means to investigate this self thoroughly. As Reb Anderson says: 

The self that comes to us through upright sitting is not the self we choose to study, not the self we expect to study, but the self that ‘may exhibit itself to us by turns’ when we just sit. It is a fresh unexpected, troublesome, difficult immediate self. This is the self that is fruitful to study.