As the pandemic subsides, I can’t help but to ponder what I have learned from the last two extraordinary years.
The biggest lesson: Nothing is permanent.
When covid became serious in March 2020, I naively thought the virus would wind down by summer time. I religiously tracked daily cases, with the misplaced hope that the virus would simply disappear one day.
I gave up after a few months.
Having lived three decades, I had never seen people so fraught with fear and uncertainties. Hospitals and morgues were overrun. Gun sales in the US exploded. Lockdowns were implemented.
When I went to the stores for masks and toilet paper — my house was down to two rolls at one point — I came home empty handed.
The busy world ground to a halt. The outlook was so bleak as if the situation would never improve again.
But it did. We learned more about the virus. We adapted how we live to keep ourselves and others safe. We rolled out vaccines, which saved many lives.
The journey has been chaotic, but step by step we slowly figure out a way forward.
Everything — both the good and the bad — passes. We never know how long a situation will last. All we can do is to accept what’s happening and try our personal best to face it. The dust eventually settles.
Accepting this is easier said than done. We don’t want changes. It’s natural, for example, to desire a return to a “normal” pre-pandemic world without the virus. We hold tightly onto certain ideas of how things are supposed to be, as if we are permanently entitled to a certain way of living.
This way of thinking, however, is an illusion. The world is constantly evolving. There’s no normal: it only lives in our head. When we refuse to accept impermanence, we experience pain. We suffer.
The virus is here to stay. The question is how we will co-exist with it. Once we accept this new reality, we can get creative and craft a new path. This is how we grow.
We will have to continue to do the same in the future. Covid is not the last crisis we will have to deal with.
The better we understand the impermanent nature of everything, the less suffering we will have.