ASK ABDI: WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN IT TAKES MORE AND MORE TIME FOR THINGS TO GET BETTER?

QUESTION: Greetings from the lockdown. I’ve been reading many many reactions from all over, including from family and friends, about their view of what’s happening.

It dawned on me that every single comment of hope has the goal of life returning to what it was before. Things like we will hug, we will kiss, and we will go to restaurants.

Being old, I have been forced to face the truth about my days in this body never returning to any earlier moment. Whatever time left is always going to be different - never as easy as it was.

My question is: what will happen when it takes more and more time for things to get better? To everyone, but especially to the young. Will they understand that the change is unavoidable - that there is no back to normal?

ANSWER: Lockdown greetings right back at you.

In times of trauma, it can be a natural instinct of the mind to hold on to “life returning to what it was before”. We certainly need to have compassion for that aspect of ourselves as well as those around us. The irony is that many of us are phoning our lives in at the best of times. We tend to live our lives unexamined and unconsciously unless some calamity forces introspection. Be that a serious illness, personal pain, or communal event like a war or pandemic.

There is much to dissect here. We can start by looking at the fact that many of us are never truly experiencing the moment due to our intense unconscious anxiety. All of our social media and material consumption is the opiate to our aching and neglected souls. Our constant thinking and headiness that is devoid of feeling our body masks this disconnect. The lockdown examined in this context will show what an intense communal withdrawal we are all experiencing. The inability to numb as efficiently due to our limited ability to interact with the external world is intense business in a hyper-busy culture.

If you are familiar with my work, you know of my emphasis on a conscious practice of dying. The intention of this practice is to do exactly what you are saying: to allow our emotional body a chance to directly experience that “change is unavoidable”. This is not a morbid exercise but rather a way to further deepen aliveness through understanding the preciousness of this ethereal realm.

Of course, it takes much work to connect with this transiency since we are living in a culture that does all it can to perpetuate the myth of no change. The intense obsession with youth, “beauty”, and all that ensues is a direct correlation to our terror of change. And no change is more permanent than death. That dirty “D” word summons up the communal terror around the fact that everything is temporal. But again, we can only live fully if we have faced our mortality.

As horrible, scary, or painful this pandemic is - this too shall pass. And people will do their best to “normalize”. But that would be missing the opportunity of this calamity to dig deeper into our lives. As we are forced to stay in, we can use this time to examine deeply what needs to stay and what needs to go in our lives. This internal house cleaning can include people, behaviors, or objects that demand too much and return too little. To have the clarity of vision, we need to slow down. Here is the gift of this situation as the slowdown is forced upon our lives.

The gift and curse of us humans is our immense capacity to adapt to external circumstances. It is not only the young that deny change or try to avoid it. It is all of us to varying degrees. And old age in and of itself does not promise the miracle of understanding. I have had the experience of sitting with people at death’s door with old age who are still seeking to consume some experience before the curtain falls. In direct response to your question, we have no control over other people. Best we can do is to examine our own lives and attempt to avoid falling asleep behind the wheel of life. The whole point of spiritual practice is to attain this wisdom while still kicking around in these meat suits. Then and only then can we fully taste this realm without being a slave to it. 

It seems like you are well on your own path of getting the sleep out of your eyes. That is one of the biggest gifts we can give this plane. One person less anxious around the temporality of this realm can affect much around them.