Is The World Really Ending?

Early weeks of 2020:

1. While the ashes of the Amazon were still cooling, uncontrolled fires engulfed Australia where a staggering 1 billion animals are now estimated dead or extinct.

2. The US assassinated the Iranian major general setting up new anxieties about World War 3.

3. The world's economy reeled from the collapse.

4. Most of us came forward and fought against CAA/NRC where major parts of the country bled.

5. Since last year there has been depressing news about flooding in the most beautiful cities across India.

6. The bloodshed tore from the Delhi streets, while relief was still finding shelter for beavered families.

All of these news events are overshadowed now by a pandemic unfurling its death cloud around the whole globe.

Those of us who are lucky enough to 'have' homes are locked in glued to the TV screen. The TV is broadcasting an update every hour, while the migrant workers are walking for days to look out for food and shelter, completely let down by cities they had hung their dreams on.

(Forgot to breathe? Same here.)

Things are so bad, everyone has schedules changed, sleep problems, haunting nightmares. My phone tracks on-screen timing and it's coming out to be 8 hours a day. With a task to sit at home, helpless against the pandemic. I have read stress is terrible for immunity - a fact that is extraordinarily stressful in itself.

The most overwhelming fact I know is that humanity lives out its whole range of emotional possibilities in each moment. As I write and as you read, somebody is watching their loved one breathe their last. While someone else close by maybe is watching their great-grandson blow their birthday candles.

I wonder why? The worst things happening are never the only things happening. but laughing fits or birthday candles won't make it to the headlines unless we somehow die from them.

Illness, calamity and death are our oldest companions. Much older than cooking, reading, or news. And if being joyous while others suffer is unethical then your every moment of contentment has been a breach - always someone else has been in great pain, only now we know it.

We read news of the greatest ongoing sufferings of the world in the palms of our hands all the time. We are following death toll updates from places where maybe we'll never get to go, hooked to the devastating tragedies we can do nothing about. I'm sure this is new for everybody, It's too much! Its lunacy, but looking away would feel madder still.

I worry some days I'm numb to bad news. I also suspect numbness is a defence against full-blown screaming despair about a world splitting open so regularly. I also know that neither numbness nor ambiguous despair is of any use to anybody. Instead, I feel both are ultimate escapes.

We are always called on to do more than just cycle through horror and forgetting. We are also called on to think clearly and help people and I am halfway there with the work that I do but is it enough? I'm always in awe of many people including doctors, household help, journalists, researchers, who have no choice but to be.

This is what it's like - we are all learning, to live through the writing of those grim sentences in history books, the sentences with death tolls in them. You mourn in big ways, you ground yourself with little things. Everything about everything changes and in defiance, you make your tea how you've always made your tea. You huddle in with the people you love, make sure everyone's eating, then you all squint and try to piece together the new shape of 'normal'.

My family and other relatives now meet on group video calls during early evenings and swap updates. We sing songs and play dumb charades. I find it sweet and so funny. I almost forget it's dystopian.

YES! Death, calamity, illnesses are unavoidable fates, inevitable visitors, always in the neighborhood, somehow still surprised when they come knocking. All we want, I think, is to forget that they are on their way. But we know too vividly that when suffering isn't at our door, it's breaking someone else's.

I always tell myself that being distressed on distressing days is only a symptom of sanity. I am trying to nourish my capacities for generosity to keep up with times that promise to extract more. In the meantime, I have little to offer you besides my notes to myself:

Sit up straight,

exhale softly,

wash your hands,

meditate on uncertainty,

care,

give easily give often,

be patient,

find yourself a faith.

#CoronaVirus #COVID19 #CoronaOutbreak