March 15: Beware

Beware these ides.

Associated with assassination historically, in the future this day will be remembered for proximity to our current pandemic.  The seriousness of the problem grips every town now and finally the powers that be begin to take it seriously.  Panic buying in the markets.  Corona.  Virus. Pandemic.  Everywhere that is anywhere, that’s the buzz-buzz.

Yet a kind of pause too, a deep breath.  Everyone was so busy just a week ago, as they had been the whole year before, and the year before that.  Our super-charged lives.  And now there is nothing to do but connect, to call friends and ask, “Are you afraid?”  What is it like there?”

Like you, my inbox includes notes from companies and agencies, organizations and institutions announcing plans and responses, how concern comes with seeing “extraordinary resilience within our community.”

Cool.  We are gonna need it.

A few years after it was over, Londoner’s who lived through the blitz of Word War Two felt nostalgia for what that terrifying time.  Despite the danger–because of it–they connected to one another.  A common enemy lent itself to a truer sense of community.  None would have chosen to return when bombs fell from the sky, but the worse it got, the more they came together.

Pandemics, regrettably, work differently.  People start brave but soon see each other as a threat.  Our challenge remains ahead of us.  We can not yet see the end of the beginning, let alone the beginning of the end.

Still, Corona looks less deadly than the plague. That’s good.  And now too, we have the internet, a second wheel of everything.  We have been using the internet as a distraction from life for a decade at least, as the main current in that super-charging that made us so busy, the busy-ness of pretending likes and tweets and posts bound us together in particular.

Now, rather than fall away from each other, see each other as a threat, as is the typical pattern of epidemics, we might use this technology to do what we should have been doing all along: dialing up the well woven global village.

The world we need after we get through Coronoa is worth talking about, together.

In the meantime, wash up, hunker down, and take care.

Because it is, as ever, a time to live.  To make.  To give.  And to be,

–Ted