EDIT: Love and The Virus

This virus of ours. It has awakened our hearts. 

Tests are taking place. Estimates of treatment are optimistic, and by summer some answers and timelines will be available with more clarity.

But the point of greatest clarity is the losses we are experiencing. People are dying, and this is a tragedy. The families of those we’ve lost all over the world are grieving. We are with them in this time of sadness. 

Their grief, and this change in the world’s health climate, has halted our steps.

The limits on our movements. The contact with our friends. The places, people, and time that have been effected in just about every part of our lives.

And yet it is precisely these losses that have brought light back into our collective hearts. We know that as one piece of the humanity on this planet,  we are again surrounded with a feeling, a unifying force of good that may provide some healing and perspective that we haven’t had in so very long. 

We are coming to the understanding that we really are all in this thing together. And because we’re together, we have finally remembered we’re all one. 

And more clearly than ever, we being to know, once again, that we belong to one another.

We are beginning-mind you, just being introduced-to the conditions that we are all facing together. The challenges of health. The concern about income. The inability to be with one another. 

We are practicing distance between one another. We have withdrawn. We are isolating. We can’t hold, touch, or share the same oxygen with one another. Cannot sit around the same table. Our behaviors are restricted to home, for those of us lucky enough to have one.  

We have been given a limit on our connecting with one another, and this may be the greatest illness of all.

And as a result, we have slowly awakened to the idea that we count on one another. Faces of people matter. Their mere presence makes a difference, and offers strength and validity, to the emotional fabric that is so frayed from the loneliness that has come upon our collective spirits. 

Without these faces, this anonymous company of togetherness, we are less for their absence. And we’re feeling this absence acutely and with longing. 

Most of us are strangers to one another. We pass one another, routinely and without a second thought. But this virus has made us recognize that the word “stranger” is becoming antiquated.

We are brothers and sisters now, kinship with a cause, aligned with the purpose of recalibrating our hearts and opening our minds to prayers, thoughts, and considerations to all of those walking slowly through this change.

We are one.

We are each other. We will survive. And, with any perspective we retain from this time, we will begin to understand one another with a compassion that has been overdue.