By Carolyn Boston, July 9, 2020 — I was just reflecting today about how grateful I am to be alive. During this pandemic I’ve had time to reflect on what life is about and what the purpose of life is, and how much I value life, and how precious it is to me, and how fleeting it can be. I reflect mostly on my mortality and the mortality of others. And it is a glare in all of our lives – we realize how dangerous others can be with their lives. If you don’t know the purpose of a thing, you’ll abuse it, and that’s a quote from a pastor I knew years ago. And I see so many people abusing their lives. I also see there’s a tremendous amount of fear — a thread, maybe a cord, not a thread but a cord of fear that is running through all of this nation and literally the world because of this pandemic. The thought of death is something—before this pandemic, we used to think about if there was a death in the family or we had a funeral to go to of a friend or a coworker. We thought about those things, we thought about death when we attended those funerals. But when we left, we went back to our lives and we didn’t think about death that much. However, now with this pandemic, we not only hear about it, but we see it every single day.
And then there are issues with murders, violence ending in death, and suicides. Sickness ending in death. So every day I know myself, I think about my mortality, as I am sure many others do. Death has never been more present, or real in our lives now. I believe that the bizarre and erratic behavior – other people that we see on television – they’re acting out of the fear of the unknown because they don’t know what’s coming. They don’t know what’s going to be. So that fear has fueled a lot of bizarre and erratic behavior of the people that I’ve seen on TV. Those that are congregating in clusters, and not wearing masks, and not wearing their gloves… it appears that they’re taking everything in light of the pandemic. I remember very clearly seeing a young man say, “Well if I die, I die.” And I thought about the quote of one of our famous forefathers and one of the things he said is, “Give me liberty or give me death.” So when I hear people say “Well my liberty is being from me because I have to wear a mask, and I am an American!” And I thought about that quote- “Give me liberty or give me death”, because many may end up in death, but they chose liberty.
So I see this so much and some have put their heads in the sand and said “There’s nothing going on and I’m going to continue to do as I did before,” but nothing is the same anymore, and it never will be. We have to embrace the fact that all the changes we’re going through are going to be with us for quite some time and they’re going to evolve into something I think perhaps even better (especially with the technology). But with the fear of death, with the fear of dying, if we don’t know why we’re here, what the purpose is for our lives—what we need to be doing to help others, to strive to not be selfish as we are in this country (and that’s my personal opinion), and be arrogant about it. It’s not going to get us to wholeness, it’s not going to get us to unity. And I have gotten up every day and been frustrated, and I would not sleep, because my concerns were the people who had gone out and just behaved as it was two years ago. It isn’t, those days are gone.
The most important thing is to live in the real, to stay in the moment and understand this is real. And we will get through it. But we have to be focused on what can we do to help other people live. So, we’re living in a very perilous time. What we decide to do, the decisions we make will make a difference in other lives.
