Living Life As It Is: Chapter 5
Apocalypse: Transcendent Awareness
Apocalypse: Transcendent Awareness
The way out is in.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh.
Self Is Others
In the last chapter I wrote about being honest with ourselves about not acting, speaking, or thinking the way we’d like to. We don’t live up to our expectations for our own behavior. This is one of the reasons I started a new daily journal habit in March 2020, to honestly record what I was thinking and feeling as we all made our way through the life-changing Covid pandemic. Speaking for myself, in many circumstances it takes me longer than I’d like to admit to honestly see and accept that I am thinking, speaking, or acting foolishly—especially in those times where I am confident (or cocky) that I am seeing things right, as compared to others. But, of course, it is hard for me to see me, but I easily see how others are not living up to my expectations for their behavior.
I ended the last chapter with the question, “Where can you be honest with yourself about your own foolishness?” Five years later, with more than 20 million of us fallen victims of Covid, we are farther from seeing our experiences of these last years as they were than we were in the first weeks of 2020.
In the very early weeks of the pandemic, when those that were fortunate enough to be safely tucked in their apartments and homes, people expressed caring and concern for others, in the way that neighborhoods come together to help each other after a major storm. In cities across the globe, and New York City especially where the pandemic hit fast and hard killing more than 46,000 in the city alone, people expressed their gratitude for healthcare workers and first responders by ringing bells, clapping, and banging pots.
As James Barron of the New York Times recently wrote in a “New York Today” column, The Searing Memories of the Pandemic’s Early Days: Five years after Covid-19 hit New York, we are still trying to comprehend the impact it had on the city and the losses we suffered. He wrote:
How fearful everyone was. “Direct human connections, the oxygen of city life, carried the threat of mortal danger,” Robert Snyder, the Manhattan borough historian, wrote in a new book of oral histories, “When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers.” “Would someone’s cough infect you with Covid-19, setting off a catastrophic cascade of events that would lead you to die alone in a hospital bed? There was no way to know.”
How the oxymoronic phrase “social distancing” became a part of everyday conversation. How the initialism “wfh,” for work from home, did, too.
How the sounds of the city changed as sirens wailed day and night from ambulances carrying sick people to hospitals, often when it was already too late—and how, in the moments when those sounds subsided, the streets were eerily quiet.
How every night at 7 p.m. an informal pots-and-pans anthem of thanks paid tribute to frontline workers.
(https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/nyregion/covid-pandemic-five-years-memories.html)
For a few brief weeks and months, there was an understanding that it wasn’t just me that was frightened, but it was all of us, our brothers and sisters in the community and the world. It was clear we were all threatened and natural compassion arose for all of us, for the world. Even if we were lucky enough to dodge illness or loss from Covid during the first blast, most of us knew someone who wasn’t, knew someone who died, or lost many family members, or lost their job.
It became clear very early that Covid had had a disproportionate impact on minority and low-income communities. Black and Hispanic coronavirus patients were hospitalized at a rate nearly five times that of white patients and they were also likely to have lost their jobs.
We cared about them. Then.