LET'S GET COSMIC.
POTUS recently shared a fork-in-the-road discussion that was held earlier on in the COVID19 pandemic. Some advisors suggested letting COVID19 run its viral course through the American population. Like the flu and the common cold. Mr. Trump defended his choice to shut down the U.S. economy and social life by referring to models from the CDC which had predicted 1-2 million deaths from the virus if it went through the population unimpeded.
Let me say right now I have no great fondness for the CDC. Having to watch Dr. Anthony Fauci regularly stirs minor PTSD in me. He was one of the prominent faces of the CDC's bungled handling of the early HIV epidemic. His provenance from that epidemic is wisely concealed in present-day introductions as he haughtily expounds on COVID19 from The White House. I prefer the sincere and somewhat humbler Dr. Birx.
The U.S. CDC has grown into an international medical bureaucracy. Frankly, its insistence upon dominating the handling of HIV globally got it to this stature. It has offices and labs around the world. Earlier in the HIV epidemic, it had some opposition from French epidemiologists who had jumped on the HIV virus with more rapid vigor. Fauci was particularly instrumental in squelching any hopes in the U.S. that the French would develop a treatment first.
Fast forward to COVID19.
The crushing effects of the Presidential and Congressional choices in dealing with COVID19 will be felt for years to come. Printing more money in the trillions of dollars to deal with the crisis will have a huge impact on all of us. It is a debt which must be paid. No escaping it. Whole sectors of our nation's economy have been gutted. The hospitality sector is probably going to be in ruins for some time to come. Independent restaurants, our finer American food vendors in most cases, have been crushed.
I cannot say I would relish making the hard decisions governments have made. What is done is done. But I think it is sane to look at the effects straight on. I think it is sane to expect the hardships which will befall all of us in the 99% as a result.
I get cosmic when the weight of it all becomes oppressive.
Getting cosmic does probably come easier to me than to many. I was told from the age of six by my Catholic parents and teachers to look at the world through the eyes of the most impoverished. When Sister Gerard waxed horrific about her experiences as a missionary in India, I took it in with appropriately agonizing empathy. When Sister Geraldine, my favorite, abandoned us to work on an impoverished American Indian reservation, my feelings of abandonment were tempered by a swelling pride in knowing her.
My Philosophy studies at my Jesuit university were an all-you-can-read buffet of profound ideas about life and The Universe. My pre-medical studies in Cellular Biology, Chemistry and Physics naturally dovetailed with some of those ideas. I was able to develop a realistic, yet aspirational, view of reality, in my opinion.
My path after graduating university brought me into the company of mystics, visual artists, musicians and performers. It was the early 1970's. I didn't need LSD to blow my mind. My education and the new stimuli of these creative minds in perpetual social conversations, many in my own apartment, exploded my rational reality.
Nearly half century later, COVID19 has led to circumstances that do not challenge my sense of reality but challenge my patience with reality. My reaction is simple. I meditate and try to maintain patience.
I use a very quick meditative method when I am feeling particularly stressed by the world around me. It originated one night in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the mid-1980's. I was alone on a starlit beach which expands for miles. The absence of artificial light and moonlight opened a breathtaking view of the stars in a cloudless sky. The stars came down to the horizons of sea and sand dune.
I allowed my mind to empty. I sat on the sand. I began feeling the planet move in relation to the vast Space above. Then my mind left the constraints of my body. I experienced a flight among the stars above, an absolute release from gravity. My being swelled with intense joy at the liberation. It was an experience of flight, light and Space ... no mental analysis or observation. I have no idea how long it lasted. But I was changed.
My cosmic meditation is simply a deep remembrance of that feeling of liberation from all that is around me and from my body itself. It is probably enabled by my acceptance of the miniscule nature of my one life and this one planet in a vast universe. Our sun itself is temporal, finite, in that vastness.
COVID19 will become the tiniest blip in human history, an even tinier blip in The Universe. We magnify it by obsessing on it. Hysteria over it is simply a manifestation of fear of the reality of our mortality and our insignificance as individuals in The Universe.
Traveling through the HIV Pandemic as both infected and hospice nurse taught me that there is indeed more to human life than our material gains, our social prominence, our successes or failures. Living is a process of expanding consciousness for those who choose it. That expansion of consciousness is life's reward when all is said and done.
Yes. A deadly virus is a scary thing, because it brings to our awareness how little control we have over our own lives. But it should strengthen our resolve to control what we can: Our minds and our intentional behaviors. In choosing to disregard those parts of life beyond our individual control, we become liberated from crippling fear and anxiety. Looking ahead, working on our mental abilities and developing the best of human behaviors toward our own bodies and toward others around us brings strength and self-esteem.
So, let's each get cosmic in a personal way. We can all strive for our best selves ... no matter how grand or humble our circumstances and no matter what happens. The rest will be what it will be.
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