Karma and the Coronavirus… Tales From the Bunker, 2020
It’s 11:51p.m., on a Sunday night, here in Burbank, mid-September 2020. The year that will forever be remembered for the coronavirus pandemic and all the havoc it caused. The year where “waking up to a blood-red sunrise, where the air is so smoky outside that your smoke alarms go off with the windows closed” is just part of the new normal. 2020 is the year where you’re already facepalming at the news and it’s not even 8:00 a.m. The year where the old analogy of stepping on a LEGO in the dark is more like stepping out of bed, putting your foot in your slipper and getting stung by a scorpion, then having a seizure, and that’s just called “Monday.” It’s enough to drive anyone crazy, or at least to the very edge, looking over the fence and staring into crazy’s yard.
This is the time of day that I can usually sit quietly and write and work on things that I can’t seem to access the impetus for, during daytime hours. I’ve been working on getting this podcast ready to launch and being the obsessive-compulsive, perfectionist I tend to be, let’s just say, it’s been as anxiety inducing as it is enjoyable. Writing is a process. Any of you reading this that also use writing as a meditation of sorts, can understand what I mean. Oddly enough, with the pandemic raging, I have plenty of time on my hands at the moment, but somehow that doesn’t matter. It seems my muse sleeps until long after lunch, and doesn’t feel like working until the conditions are suitable for a muse to ... well, muse. He usually wakes up when everyone else is asleep - and makes sure I’m up when he feels like spouting his rhetoric. Tonight he’s giving me pearls. So I’m making a necklace…
Today was almost forty degrees cooler than last Sunday, despite the fact that the majority of the West Coast is smoldering as I sit here and mind-doodle. It’s still somewhat on the outskirts of summer in Southern California, but I can slowly feel it slipping through the cracks, much in the same way that seconds turn into minutes and minutes turn to hours and hours turn to months… skipping right past days & weeks. Since the start of the lockdown, time seems to have thrown us into some sort of Groundhog Day, repetitive loop, where the beginning of all of it is sort of hazy and I keep hoping that I’ll wake up on the other end of a wormhole and it’ll all be in some alternate universe.
As a kid, I remember when summer vacation seemed like an eternity. Those ten weeks between the school year were what every kid lived for, yet, we took it for granted because we thought it would always be that way. As the decades pass, I’m finally beginning to experience time for what it really is; a series of “Now” moments that we sometimes tend to view from either past memories, or with hopes for the future. Life these days feels similar to floating on a beach towel, in a bowl of cream of mushroom soup, blindfolded. Lately, it seems to be this way from morning to night, kicking and flailing, to stay afloat and keep from going under, into the thick, mush that is life in the time of COVID-19.
But, despite all of that, even when the world is literally aflame, the possibility to be happy is still always there, within us… It’s important to remind ourselves that happiness is always a choice we need to make, from moment to moment, but it becomes more difficult to choose to be happy, when all seems grim and the future that looms before us is so uncertain. That’s why I turn to writing it all down, so I can see it, in letters, formed into words, to make more sense of it. I think that’s essentially why I even write. It’s the catharsis I need to help me clean the mud off the windows of my mind to reassure me that the sun is still there, nourishing my garden and keeping me warm. Sometimes, I run out of glass cleaner and need to refill my tank. That’s where meditation comes in. That’s why I sit, morning and evening. The more I practice mindfulness with meditation and go inside myself, the more the windows become clear again, so I can allow the light to penetrate the cold, dark prison cell I sometimes lock myself in.
COVID lockdown days are nondescript, long and monotonous. It’s difficult to wrap your head around anything, long enough to contemplate what you’re experiencing, when the daytime hours are bombarded by the annoying, ubiquitous bickering that courses through the veins of our hyper connected society. All one has to do is flip a switch or push a button and suddenly a screen is screaming with scenes of havoc and mayhem. People taking sides, creating distance between one another, instead of focusing on the issue and working together to solve it. It has a lot to do with the endless choices we’re constantly faced with, moment to moment. Life as I remember it from back in the day, was much different without the “devices” we’ve been tethered to for the last two decades.
The problem with many of us is that our minds are so used to being on autopilot, that most of the time it makes those choices for us, based on our internal hard drive that stores every stitch of information and every experience we’ve ever had, from the time we left the womb, to the present moment. These unconscious choices are the ones of left versus right, good versus evil, fact versus fiction, politics versus human rights. Sometimes, there’s so much information inside our brain that we don’t even realize that we have conflicting opinions that don’t even make sense. It’s enough to make you bonkers. And let me tell you, I’ve been no stranger to bonkers these last six months. In fact, bonkers and I have become tight. It’s actually “Bonkers” that’s making me write… mostly at night.
The thick layer of gloom that seems to be a blanket on our world at the moment, is suffocating the happiness out of the lives of so many of us. I attribute a lot of that to the amount of information that we’re constantly having flash before us, every second. There are so many individual “fires” in our own lives and when you add them to the blaze that’s eating through the forest of humanity at the moment, it becomes all too much for any one person to cope with, day to day. The only way to make our way through the smoke and emerge without asphyxiating ourselves is to slow it down, by going inside our minds and taking control of our actions. This is the goal of meditation.
It’s been six months of trying to save money, trying to stay healthy, keeping away from the virus, keeping the fridge stocked and homeschooling a kindergartener that’s now a first grader. Watching her grow on a daily basis, (at the rate that a human grows in the early stages), has been the glue that’s held me together, through the infinite rattling that I’ve been enduring. It’s not just the physical rattling from the daily routine, either. It’s the psychological rattling that does the most damage. However, when I consider that I’m not alone enduring this, that thought is what humbles me. How can I cry anyone a river, when there are enough of those tears from everyone else’s plight to fill the Pacific Ocean? “We’re all in this together” is the phrase we all keep repeating to each other, while we sit at home, in front of our laptops and engage in the new definition of “spending time with friends” on a zoom call. The lack of human contact we’ve all endured is enough to break even the most devout introvert. Yet, we’re all still here… at least most of us. COVID continues to pummel the world, with no rhyme or reason, bouncing around like a tornado. Wrecking one house, while the one right next door stands, intact and unscathed… it’s like Russian roulette, every time you leave the house, not knowing if a sneeze or a cough from the bread aisle at the supermarket is going to be your demise. It’s unnerving, to say the least.
Six months went by in the blink of an eye. It seems like my eyelids closed in March and when they opened, it was Labor Day. After a while, the days are a blur, one bleeding into the next, while the entire world suffers together. The air is so thick with emotion, we’re all struggling to breathe. Even though breathing around others can actually be dangerous, because if we breathe incorrectly, there’s a chance that we’ll end up needing a machine to breathe for us... The fact that the air is now physically altered with the smoke from the pyre that’s consuming my state is so morbidly ironic that it’s almost, like ...ironic.
Still, I soldier through, because I know, like all great catastrophes, this too, shall pass.