The Covid19 crisis is bringing our mortality home in ways that few us have ever experienced.
Death is in every headline, and in many private conversations. And lockdown itself is like death, an imitation of death. We are as constrained in our activity as one who is severely ill. Everything we had looked forward to has been scrapped or postponed to some vague distant date. Pleasures we regard as normal and every day, a drink outside a pub on a sunny day, a long-planned trip to the theatre, dinner with friends, playing in a team game – all are forbidden. When my mother was dying she said to me, with desperate sadness, “I’ve got nothing to look forward to.” For now we are in the same condition. We taste something of the same stress, anxiety, constriction, the same bitter regret for the wonderful lives we have had to give up.
Our lockdown life is a collective rehearsal for the death that all of us will eventually face alone. How can we live this life calmly, with equanimity?
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Prince says, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space were it not that I have bad dreams.” For me, the ‘bad dreams’ are the wild lurches of mood we experience during this crisis. Behind every new mood there is the grim recognition that there is no easy way out of the crisis. Those of us with the money and free time can try to escape by binging – on drink or television or something else – but stuck within our homes, the emotional cost of that bounces off our four walls in no time.
I find meditation helps. If you have never tried it, there has never been a better opportunity to dive in. Zen meditation embraces the empty moment that is all that remains when the ornaments of our lives are stripped out. You fold your legs and take up the posture and, once you are completely still, what remains is you, your breath, this moment of your life – and all eternity; and nothing wrong anywhere. You are bounded in a nutshell, and you are a king of infinite space.
At least that’s what the Zen masters tell us, those who have made a lifetime’s study of the Moment. The rest of us can get at least an inkling of what they mean. And with that, the locked down life becomes a little saner, a little easier.