Reflections in pandemic times!

As Fall sets in and leaves don beautiful pastel shades of red and yellow before turning crisp to detach themselves - the finale performance act of the season by Nature is a timely reminder for us to take a pause and reflect on the year gone by.  Reflection is a very empowering and fulfilling process irrespective of the time of the year and infinitely more so when we have been wrecked by the pandemic.

The Corona pandemic has taken away the lives and livelihoods of millions, pushed them into poverty eroding all the gains made over multiple decades. While the economic impact attracts more attention, the social and mental impact has been worse. Continued isolation due to stringent lockdowns, no social get-togethers, birthdays, anniversaries, vacation breaks with friends, working from home, no team or client meetings, etc. almost no social engagement in any form has created unbearable pressure on our minds. Homo Sapiens, the social animal, has been confined to the four walls and is progressively slipping into the ‘cave’ syndrome. With the possibility of multiple Covid waves, there is no end date per se, the psychological pressure thus created is beginning to take its toll. We can see the reaction in the form of defiance to rules and protests. In some cases, Governments not wanting to lose their political capital, have given up and left it to the citizenry. Does this mean we are in the throes of permanent structural damage? 

The world has witnessed pandemics before but nothing this widespread or of this scale.  It has stood testimony to events of similar impact, not necessarily referring to previous pandemics alone, but calamitous events of significance, and in this blog, I plan to draw lessons from these and extrapolate to help us navigate the emotionally complex situation currently we find ourselves into. Going telescopically back in time, into the Greek and Roman civilization, and taking a leaf from a generation of practicing philosophers of the time down to events from the past century, we have a lot of wisdom. We can also look to practitioners, survivors of catastrophic events, or revolutionists who were confined to solitary imprisonment for years.  Picking up wisdom from them and reflecting would be more fulfilling, allowing us to embrace the continuing uncertainty and prepare for it at the same time. I am certain it will calm our minds and help us to withstand the impending storm. It will also allow us to acknowledge, appreciate and value things that we took for granted and hopefully keep it that way when it gets better. My final hope from this blog is that it will help us reflect in connecting with our lives which we were losing to the maddening pace and make us humbler and kinder human beings.

With awful stillness around us, for the majority, our minds have been running on overtime mode, and in the process raising more questions than finding answers. I can certainly bet that most ruminations must be philosophical in nature. These questions always existed and were always meant to be asked but the rat race didn’t allow us to do so or if I may dare to say that we were trying to find an escape from answering these uncomfortable questions by knowingly indulging in the rat race. The accompanying action did not leave much time and space. Therefore the current pause, despite its tormenting origin, has afforded us much-needed time to think about what we take granted as 'normal'? What is truly important in life/to us? What is life? What is the nature of our existence? What is the meaning and purpose of life? Is it only material or something beyond that, something more meaningful? How much do we truly need to live? What is ethical and moral to do? and how did we fare against our own moral standards? or did we conveniently overlook at the expense of the weak and poor? For e.g., is hoarding of food and essentials by who can afford (read us) ethical? When facing a shortage of beds, ventilators, medicine, oxygen, etc., who should be saved first, elders or kids or who is in the queue or those who can afford it? Plus many more questions that you and I have. The mixed emotions of uncertainty, anxiety, stress and fear brought about by the pandemic have forced us to ask the very same existential questions which philosophers have been exploring for centuries. We can benefit from their wisdom. Another positive fall-out of this exercise is that pondering on these questions makes all of us philosophers.

In this expedition, I gravitate towards people who have lived it like us and are not of the preacher kind. Giving ‘gyan’ to others without having to live through the constraints of real life, is simpler stuff. It was therefore natural for me to gravitate towards Aurelius, the last in the illustrious list of Stoics whose timeless philosophy and wisdom continue to be the north star to this day and guide us to sail through these tempestuous conditions safely. The lineage of Stoics is much longer and each a school unto themselves, I anchor myself the most with Aurelius because in him we have a real person, in flesh and blood, who was able to reflect and practice while living with real-world responsibilities and challenges. He was King of the largest and most influential empire of the time, was under constant attack from enemies (majority of his notes are from the war-front), was faced with a raging plague-pandemic which killed millions of people and likely him as well, and was challenged with the rise of Christianity as a religion. Despite kingly responsibilities and all-out assaults, he was able to reflect and practice. In fact, most of his reflections were from the war-front. There are many texts including religious which have similar lessons for us, but they are mostly mythical or coming from preachers, with the onus on others to follow, whereas Aurelius wrote for himself.

The crux of his reflections and answer to most questions I asked before lies in the practice of ‘Virtue’, the highest good. Not the dictionary meaning but as Stoics defined it - Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, and Justice. It has the capacity to respond to all situations we face and gain what we seek - love, honor, reputation, happiness… Be good...Do good. He reflects, “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.” Going further, “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be, Be one.” His philosophy is rooted in Action over Words to achieve a fulfilled life, akin to Karma in Hindu philosophy. “Live a good life. If there are Gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are Gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no Gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.” A life led in harmony with nature and the universe leads to happiness.  Many a time unhappiness stems from the fact that, per us, someone said or did something wrong. Instead of finding fault with others, “whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”  Drawing parallels in Indian Philosophy, Kabir Saheb, the philosopher-poet had similar wisdom for us in his doha (couplet), “When I went out in search of the rogue, I did not find any. But when I searched within, I realized I am the worst of all”. Therefore, I believe that acting justly, even in most adverse times, is the path to happiness, “If it is not right do not do it, if it is not true do not say it.” As a citizen of one cosmic city, doing well for humanity and appreciating what one has is the way to live. That’s the answer to anxiety, fear, stress -  the feelings we are experiencing amidst the pandemic. These feelings get exacerbated when; a) we think too much about the future and; b) measure ourselves based on others' opinions. During the beginning of the pandemic, I too was completely capsized by the former. I believed that this vicious cycle of waves across the world and the bleak prospect of achieving herd immunity would lead to the collapse of lives and livelihood and my own family may not remain untouched by it. A similar line of thinking also led a close friend of mine to mild depressionary bouts. To such a state, Aurelius reflects, “Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present”. Roughly two years into the pandemic, at a macro level the people and the states have reacted and coped with it spectacularly, well beyond my initial apprehensions. On the latter thought too, Aurelius reasons, “I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.” When others' thoughts fuels our ambition and we tie it to our well-being, the path cannot be anything but unpleasant. Despite knowing where it will lead to, we still follow it and bewail from feeling miserable. We are mostly concerned, what will people think? “The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.”  “But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are, how arbitrary.”

In the real world, there are constraints and priorities, hence stressors exist and will continue to do so, therefore it boils down to our response towards it. Aurelius dwells on, “You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” In one of his notes he beautifully captures how he goes about practicing it, “Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions - not outside.” I find echoes of similar thoughts in Viktor Frankl’s reflections in ‘Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager’ later republished in English as ‘Man's Search for Meaning’. He lived through Holocaust, a genocide on a scale never seen before. He lost his entire family to this pogrom, and would not have survived himself either, but he never lost hope. In his notes, he profoundly reflects, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” So deep and metaphysical. His entire family succumbed to gas chambers, he himself was moved over to four camps including the most dreaded Auschwitz-Birkenau but even within these extremely barbaric circumstances where odds of survival are next to none, he chooses to exercise his power of response. He notes, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Two of the greatest personal reflections from persons from two colossally different eras, who experienced and responded, strikingly carry the same message for us.

Another set of people who have seen very long periods of solitary confinement are the Russian revolutionists. Many of them wrote memoirs that give us a glimpse of how they felt and responded. These memoirs are full of insights and have profound lessons for us in this period of continued isolation. My light-touch summary does not do justice to the unimaginable hell they went through but I hope we can pick a few of the many lessons they offer. In isolation, one of them reminisces their feelings, “Full isolation, being torn away from the entire external world, the lack of contact with people—all this acts amazingly oppressively on a person’s psyche.” “ ...isolation was absolute and hopeless..”. We are experiencing similar thoughts, obviously though to a much lesser degree than a solitary-confinement. However, the common ground is mental health and it is the biggest issue cutting across generations. The brain is going crazy that we have not been able to meet friends or some of us staying overseas have not been able to travel and meet parents. Many of us haven’t seen office colleagues or for many of us,  the new school of our kids is the computer screen. Women are having to take a disproportionate load of managing homes, kids' schooling, and still delivering results in the office. Relationships have become fragile. The Russian revolutionaries went through worse and their response is a goldmine of their actions and thoughts and can be extrapolated to build our response. They went to great lengths to form communities and communicate in some way, at times inventing new means. However little or broken that communication was, it was meaningful. When their ways were discovered or some prisons behaved notoriously, they trained their minds through the power of imagination, dreaming of an alternate reality. It was not running away but a response mechanism. Many of them mastered new foreign languages and read the Bible or Rousseau or Goethe or Marx in the original text. Instead of letting the mind wander from dawn to dusk, many found escape in books. One revolutionary recalls, “If reading is a necessity on the outside, then it is far more necessary in prison, with all the monotony and uniformity of prison life, where with the lack of people in, say, solitary confinement, a book often replaces a comrade.” Few of them found their release in keeping the body busy - the easiest way being exercising. The exercise was not a physical activity anymore but assumed larger significance. In whichever way one could, one tried responding to gain control over the insanity the solitary confinement was inflicting. I have tried many of these and can vouch that they work. I learned German, a new foreign language (partly due to necessity as well), developed a deep interest in Western Philosophy, and immersed myself into it by reading a lot and listening to lectures. This blog is also a result of that. Continuing with learning a new skill, recently I have started taking Guitar lessons, hoping to pick up the basics and play a few chords of my favorite nos. One of the things I noticed is that many communities got together around cooking. I tried out too and have enjoyed the process. Some of the new things I have tried have now become a regular in lunch or dinner. Maintaining a sense of community has largely been through group video calls, better than nothing but far short of in-person connections. I do sorely miss meeting my friends and parents, something I hope to make up when barriers are lifted. In my case, since the entire family was together, we kept each other in good spirits. The occasional outbursts reminded us that we are still human and fragile. With sports, I would consider myself lucky. Golf is unique in that it can be played alone, is a non-contact sport, and can be played outdoors. With some relaxation, twosomes were allowed and that helped me maintain community touch within a bubble group. Interestingly, I haven't played as many rounds in 5 years as I have played this year. My place offers many forest walks and is thinly populated making it easy to maintain some kind of exercise ritual. We were never much into watching television but in these confined times, as a family, we watched or rather caught up on many series, most memorable being binging on all the ten seasons of ‘Friends”. Collectively all the efforts put together have helped me and my family in beating the isolation to a great extent. It worked then with Russian revolutionaries and works now in the current context.

Staying long in the minimalist mode, haven’t we all encountered the question, what is truly important to us? and suddenly money wasn’t on the top.  In the peak of the 2nd wave in India, the money could not buy medicines or oxygen or could get a bed in the hospital. The virus doesn’t differentiate between the rich and the poor, though very strictly speaking the poor have been impacted disproportionately. This extraordinary situation underscored the appreciation of what is truly necessary in life. “Remember this, very little is required to make a happy life.” We have heard this from the ascetics but rarely from the head of the richest and the most powerful kingdom who could have had everything he wished for. The pause also brought upon the realization that we are ‘what we are’ and ‘where we are’ because of the hundreds of people who have touched our lives and supported us.  We are indebted to them and yet we have been overlooking gratitude towards them. One of the most distinguishing features of Aurelius’s journal is the way it begins. Book 1 titled ‘Debts and Lessons’, is full of gratitude towards each person who shaped him. It is just not the thank yous but also why he is thankful and what is learned from them. Of the many, I have picked up two of them to make my point - “From Rusticus: to get an impression of need for reform and treatment of character; not to run off into zeal for rhetoric, writing on speculative themes, discoursing on edifying texts, exhibiting in fanciful colors the ascetic or the philanthropist. To avoid oratory, poetry, and preciosity; not to parade at home in ceremonial costume or to do things of that kind; to write letters in the simple style, like his own from Sinuessa to my mother. To be easily recalled to myself and easily reconciled with those who provoke and offend, as soon as they are willing to meet me. To read books accurately and not be satisfied with superficial thinking about things or agree hurriedly with those who talk around a subject. To have made the acquaintance of the Discourses of Epictetus, of which he allowed me to share a copy of his own.” “From Apollonius: moral freedom, not to expose oneself to the insecurity of fortune; to look to nothing else, even for a little while, except to reason. To be always the same, in sharp attacks of pain, in the loss of a child, in long illnesses. To see clearly is a living example that a man can be at once very much in earnest and yet able to relax.” It is a masterclass on gratitude and if we do the same we can battle out anxiety and depression and enrich our lives with happiness. I have a lot of work to do here and kick it off in earnest.

My reflections will continue as I continue to experience, read, think and do. Never cease to follow and persevere the path of Virtue. There is no end, no destination, just a journey with numerous milestones. As a parting thought, I quote Aurelius one final time, “When you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Let me wake up with gratitude of being alive!

                                                                                     ***

P.S.:I started writing this when Fall had set in last year and the pandemic was in its full rage. I left it and could complete my reflections only now but decided to leave the opening para as it is, though we are in full-blown summer.