“For most of time, Earth was a safe and stable home for our world. But over the last century, your world has been advancing exponentially in technology but remaining stagnant in wisdom. You’re rapidly gaining tremendous powers but still behaving like short-sighted primates. The voice of wisdom is there, but it’s being trampled over by political parties, religions, and nations too mired in blind conflict to lift their heads up and see the bigger picture.”
Everything is a matter of perspective. Read this wonderful reflection on perspective in the age of the virus.
Some folks are tempted to throw a pity party. Why a virus? Why us? Why now? This question does not differ much from people asking physicists why the universe exists, why there is something rather than nothing. To which one such physicist answered:
“Why is there something, rather than nothing?”
“If there were nothing, you’d still be complaining.”
Have more time on your hands? Try creativity! Here’s a marvelous guide.
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.My dad had a six hour open-heart surgery to help his body recover its strength so that he could return to being Mr. Fix-it. There are few things humans can’t do when they put their hearts into it without holding back.
So glad your dad will soon return to pushing the boulder up the hill.