Isolation and connection

Have you heard enough yet about COVID-19? I know I have. But chances are it’s not going away overnight. It'll be the top news story for weeks to come.

By now we’re probably all hoping for something positive to emerge from this pandemic and its disruptive effects. In a comment on a Facebook post I recently wrote that if there was to be a positive outcome it would be that we’d give our bodies the care they’ve always deserved. That’s still a fit object for hope, but I think we can do better.

Amidst our isolation we see signs of hope for more connection. One sign is technology being used in more and better ways–or even just used more–to connect us, even in our respective physical seclusions. Technology makes a lot of things easier when it works. But its best use is to bring together people who might not come together or stay in touch otherwise. If you’re reading this you already knew that, so there’s no need to belabor it.

An even more positive outcome will be to foster and strengthen compassion among us, for those within our communities and everywhere in the world. We usually hear of disasters hundreds or thousands of miles away, affecting people we’ve never met and will probably never meet–disasters most of us will probably never experience. Now, within our own communities, we hear of working people bereft of incomes, people thrown together in isolated clusters (families/households) who may or may not be able to stand it, people who risk their own health and lives to provide care and services for others, and perhaps people who get this disease and may die from it. Here, like never before in our lifetime, is an opportunity for isolated people to connect through compassion.

When people are able to gather again, quite likely there’ll be an increased desire to do so. Perhaps people will connect in person, as well as virtually, like never before in our lifetime. Perhaps decades of increasing social isolation can be reversed.

We are all one species, all One Being. If this pandemic and its temporary physical isolation help us to realize that unity, that will be its greatest positive outcome.