The COVID-19 pandemic was an opportunity. Not explicitly to make things better (subtopic of competence addiction/driven/goal-oriented) but rather to see a different side of the coke can. A different perspective. That is to say if when we saw the world we could see with eyes unclouded by our wants and desires, driven by our grievances about individuality and limitations, we would then see ourselves in our proper place in the natural order of things: as a conduit. Our eyes experience the world around us. And by that logic when we looked at the images of major cities before and after the lockdown and when we saw the deer return to the human-occupied-zones, when we saw with our own eyes the rivers and streams begin to run clear again, what feeling did that emote in each of us?
Well, I cannot speak for everyone, but I can certainly recall the very genuine reactions in people around me and reported on television. Beauty. Wonderment. It was - in my lifetime - the first time I could see a world wherein humans were compelled to co-exist with the rest of the world during those times known as the lockdown.
It’s as if the world was telling us to slow down and consider what the planet could look like, not without humans, not by their subjugation, but through those old accords made with the land by our forebearers, however long divorced from our individual lineages. The google images provide a clear comparison of the two worlds seemingly existing in parallel universes. It reminds me of the photos of Europe before and after the second world war, only in reverse. And that was the obligate opposite of the tragedy of that generation. And this is the unfortunate upside-down our timeline finds ourselves in.
It only became bittersweet when our preconditions entered the equation. The shops are closed. I can’t go to the movies. I’m stuck inside. Please understand: this is not to say that it was all greed and selfishness. The United States is woefully dependent on foreign countries - namely Communist China - for producing life-saving medications such as Insulin. With the borders and ports closed this created a disastrous malay wherein people were dying - not of COVID - but of diabetic-related complications and other chronic diseases. Preventative surgeries were postponed indefinitely, leading to the countless deaths of desperate people waiting on surgeries that would not come.
And people were dying of COVID. We were given standing orders at work to not administer oxygen and breathing medications to patients in the back of the ambulance for fear of spreading contaminated aerosolized particulates. If the patient was going to die without it we were given instructions to pull over to the side of the road, open all the doors and windows, and administer the bronchodilators (which takes approx 15 minutes) before continuing on to definitive care - where the patient needed to be. It was murder on the heart. People were forced to watch their loved ones - husbands, wives, parents, brothers, and sisters - die alone over Zoom and FaceTime. Funeral homes wouldn’t handle bodies in the early days of the pandemic, leading to overflowing morgues with no funeral rites to be had. No closure for families. The chain was broken and the damage was irreparable.
I imagine you are wondering how I could conceive of this as an opportunity. Well, it was, if you can remove yourself from the equation as the sole serial benefactor. This is to say that through all that suffering, all of the lockdowns and school closures, and everything that happened to us as a species, consider instead what was shown to us.
What was the planet showing us while we were forced to stop what we were doing for a little while? All you had to do was walk outside and be quiet long enough to see nature repairing the wounds that were tearing us apart from within. We saw the wild encroaching on land it had long since retreated from, banished for the pursuit of more. The air became more clean and more inviting without the smog from billions of vehicles. The rivers and streams began to run clear again, inviting fish to return to waters once disturbed by motorized boats and boom boxes.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c4ecee8-7d8f-45cf-8489-d0d1dd3f39ec_1600x1200.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fff4f2d15-9522-41d1-9d87-58c75b336af1_900x580.jpeg)
The world became a trifle less noisy, and from that place of mouna (Sanskrit for silence/ non-speaking) we could see ourselves - not as the megaphone that projects our preconditions and notions onto the world -but as the conduit - which articulates the world through our eyes. And in that way of seeing ourselves, we could finally see the relationship with our environment as an accord; with the consequences of that accord seen as a reflection on itself. Because what do we do when we look in the mirror? We brush our hair, and our teeth (or as George Carlin said the four key areas: armpits, asshole, crotch, and teeth) and we put makeup on and perhaps pluck some unsightly hairs. We check for lumps and we think about how we are going to prop up this image in front of us but also propagate the vessel that we carry ourselves in. So then by that measure, if the earth and all of its sentient inhabitants are reflections, would we not be compelled to follow in lockstep with the first example?
What was the message through those times of stillness? Limitation. As things contract, it is in the nature of things for them to then expand. That’s the big bang theory in a nutshell, right? And in that limitation detached from the individual, the images of nature returning was just an example - at scale - of that expansion and contraction. There’s no grudge match there, just the ebb and flow of things. At the risk of beating a dead horse, let me say one more time that everything that I am saying does not discount the devastation to human life that occurred and is still occurring as a direct result of the novel coronavirus. Rather, it is underwritten by this tragedy. And if there were ever a time to get serious and lay the cards out on the table, this was it, man. They were it. All the dead. All the pain. All the didn’t-get-tos and how-could-it-bes. All the unresolved stuff that lay in the pile of ashes that so many people refer to those years as. Do you really believe that those people died so we could shop at Wal-Mart without masks? So we could achieve same-day Amazon delivery?
As it would appear, that is exactly the narrative that was fed. Veiled under the lies of individual autonomy, the pursuit of your best self, back to normal, millionaire moguls became billionaire astronauts seemingly overnight with contactless delivery, groceries to your door, and the delegation of the responsibility of traveling to a place and the consideration that entails. (Consider this. If you want to go to the store you are going to consider your commute as to whether or not you sojourn the purchase. Online shopping bypasses this limitation and therefore incentivizes us to make greater use of that “One click option.”) What was created under good intentions to combat the problem of old ladies fearful to go to the grocery store eventually delivered unfettered consumerism and a return to before with the stain of condemnation; like a kid who has been told no by his parents and lashes out by eating all the candy in the cabinets. And even though the emotional reaction by the child embodies “Don’t tell me what to do Mom” what is at the heart of his consternation is a desire to be free. To be trusted. What comes out though is a complete disregard for the money that had to be earned to buy the food, the other people in the house who can no longer share it, or the feelings of the individuals who feel sold out and robbed from. And that’s the desire Amazon captured in us. They fed into our inner child that says “Fuck you Dad” but they did something else. They said that this behavior was okay. Encouraged. And moreover, responsible. Keep everyone safe, 6 feet apart, we’re all in this together, buy our artificially marked-down items conveniently shipped to your doorstep while all of our competitors are forced to be closed and be unable to compare with our prices.
And that’s what we did. The numbers don’t lie. And what happened when the lockdowns lifted and the cars filled the roadways again? People returned to old habits whilst continuing the same purchasing habits online. And the way the system is structured, everyone has blood on their hands. We all accumulate a debt for which we will never repay simply by being alive. All of the things that had to die just so you could be here reading the words on this page - no good deed, carbon offset, or Janeist life of pacifism will balance the scales.
Our shared culpability makes conversations like this difficult to have with one another because it’s nearly impossible to conduct such dialogue without someone chiming in with something to the tune of “everybody does it” or “and what about you?” When I got on the fire department I remember old-timers talking about when they would drink alcohol at the fire stations. When a rookie would come to the station to find a bunch of old guys cracking open beers at the beginning of the shift, they would compel the new kid to drink a beer. Just a sip - that’s all it took. You see, by forcing him to drink he was now unable to rat out the other firefighters to the administration. Everyone’s got blood on their hands kid, drink up. And this is what the big corporations and their government cronies have done. And they believe themselves to be the administration and have given us Carte Blanche to drink up with them running out the back door to the banks. And by that measure, the double-bind is created wherein no one is accountable, no one is held accountable.
This is the contradiction that exists in the endless pursuit of what we think we want for who we think we are. We destroy ourselves as we believe we are feeding ourselves. And like a tumor, it grows consuming its host until both the host and the tumor dies. Now that’s a pretty bleak proposition for us, isn’t it? Take the emotional reaction out of it and consider only the way we as a society have chosen to take, rather than submitted to accept the limitations that were forced upon us in 2020. We have made our beds and accumulated our debt. No amount of poetic dictation or savvy oration will see us through that. No new tech item that promises to make things easier (like all technology does) is going to do so when we cannot ask the simple question of ourselves “Does this thing make me more human, or less human?”
No, the house was going to fall anyway. It always was. Make no mistake, friends. The house always falls down. But here’s the thing. A society that believes there is but one life to live and that it should be lived to its full potential is one soaked with the insecurity of attachment. It negates that life exists beyond your own and props up individual desires for impermanent things that were never meant to last.
But that does not mean that those things were not consequential. Human beings are consequential. Wars, famine, monuments, the Anthropocene. Humans are consequential. And so are the things we make to fulfill our impermanent lives and confuse and distract us from its certain end. And in the anxiety and obfuscation of such consequences, we do all kinds of things to distract ourselves from this hard reality, filling the time as we wait for that next order to come in.
Maybe the bitter end is only bitter because of the meaning we have imparted upon it. Maybe it looks something like an old Leonard Cohen song I heard from someone I hold in deep esteem.
Well we’re drinkin’ and we’re dancin’ and the band is really happenin’
and the place is dead as heaven on a Saturday night.
And my very close companion’s got me falling, got me laughing.
She’s a hundred but she’s wearin’ somethin’ tight.
And I lift my glass to the awful truth that you can’t reveal to the ears of youth…
…except to say that it isn’t worth a dime.
And the whole damn place goes crazy twice
And it’s once for the Devil, and it’s once for Christ.
And the boss don’t like these dizzy heights.
So we’re busted in the blinding lights of closing time.