Interesting times. The news narrative, the political narrative, the economic one, the medical one, the mental distress one and the ‘subtle understanding shift’ one.

We have a strong sense that something is going wrong, that there is a New Normal.

Nothing is going wrong, this is all normal.

The world, as constituted, is woven through with danger, unpleasantness and fear. As Buddhism points out, there is birth, disease, old age, and death. The last three don’t occur without the first, or in a predictable order.

The world, as constituted, is also filled with compassion, understanding, co-operation and sympathy and empathy and love; endless amounts of all.

None of us can point to anything for sure happening tomorrow. You may say, “Of course I can, there will be a sunrise.”. Not if you die before then.

Yet, we live in a dreamworld that whispers to us that if we just follow our passions we can derive satisfaction, if our kitchen pantry is full and an array of exercise equipment is available we are on the right track. We really feel (justifiably we insist), that is the way things should be for everyone, we chant inclusively, but even in this dreamworld, unrealistically.

We’ve lived at the height of the greatest and richest Empire the world has ever known and we felt it was our due and rightful inheritance, and now it falls apart and not so slowly, but surely; and we struggle. We’ve lived the lives of ‘The Gods’ of just 2000 years ago (or way less) and we called it normal. Whoops!

Every human is born as a result of good past karma, but unless we comport our lives to reality, that karma wears out, often early in life. Certainly towards the end, unless we change how we live them.

It is never, ever, too late. Every human can individually change their range of choices to better ones, refine already good ones and start to refrain from poor ones. Just effort required.

Easy? No. If it was easy we would have been doing it all along. And, we haven’t.

Yet, here we are.

There are still birds and the trees,

the flowers and the bees; for real,

in our hearts and minds, for real.

We are not doomed, we have just painted ourselves into a corner, after all we are the ones who created the condition for this virus to be successful. Migrating birds interact with animals kept in close proximity of human habitation and raised for food and viruses, (science doesn’t know for sure whether they are a ‘real’ life form?) move from the birds to farmed animals to humans. Whoops! (Polite puzzled laughter.)

Somewhere within all of this is an opportunity and it is not of the narrative qualities  we’ve assigned to our Interesting Times. It’s in a very personal waking up to the possibility of co-operative change.

Co-operating with the world as it is; not how we have insisted it be.

We have a New Normal forming in the alternatives we choose to see, not the one’s we’ve picked in search of constant comfort.

Hope for the best

Expect nothing

Do the possible