A Meaningful Time

As communities are slowly and gradually stepping out of Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, we hear and read many people describe their pandemic experiences in one of the three contexts:

A) Suffering in the form of personal illness, loss of a loved one or loss of employment.

B) Inconvenience. Boring. Unproductive.

C) Feeling grateful for staying healthy, employed, productive and focused on relationships.

A friend recently said that while he felt very blessed to have a job that paid him even when he was at home, he also felt disturbed that, at the same time, millions of people were thrown deep into poverty and suffering.

In the age of social media as we plan, snap and advertise every selected moment of life, our sense of happiness and sadness is often linked to comparison with others. Am I as happy as I see people are on Instagram is subconsciously answered and a verdict — to be happy or not — is issued instantly as we scroll over the feeds on our devices. And, we start feeling grateful for our good health when we see others in pains of illness. We feel blessed to have loved ones around us when we hear others lose theirs.

A fourth way to look at this pandemic era is to consider it a meaningful time. Most of us are unwittingly slowed down and offered the opportunity to take a deeper stock of the situation and to seek meaning in it.

I used to procrastinate certain things in the past thinking there will be better times in the future to figure them out. One question, in this long list of certain things, has been: at my deep core, what do I want? In other words, in this one life that has been bestowed upon me, what is the one fundamental thing that I want? I hope finding an answer to this question will also enable me to know myself. I must confess, I have spent more time trying to know, rather interpret, others. Little do I know, if anything, about myself. I’m a mystery to myself. Unexplored.

Perhaps you too had questions, thoughts and feelings that you left unexplored in the haste of pre-pandemic life. Maybe now is the time for you to do that. It’s a meaningful time. Use it for some meaningful purpose.