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In other words, the coronavirus is the perfect teacher of responsibility. The coronavirus is contagious days before its symptoms appear in you. You do not know when you become infected! During that time you can infect others without knowing it and without them knowing it (because they do not know when they become infected, either), and they can (will) very quickly infect others and on and on and on and on. These are the things that make the coronavirus very dangerous. It is extremely contagious, everyone can unknowingly infect anyone else, and it can kill you. In other words, if you mindlessly endanger yourself, you mindlessly endanger others. If others recklessly endanger themselves, they recklessly endanger you. To echo Lakota wisdom, the health of one is the health of all, and the illness of one is the illness of all.
The coronavirus teaches us the most basic lesson about love and fear. To slow the spread of the coronavirus I must isolate myself from you and keep a distance. Yet these are behaviors of fear. How can I care for you and isolate myself from you at the same time? How can I love you and keep a distance from you at the same time? This is the contradiction that makes the coronavirus the perfect teacher of all that is truly valuable. There is only one alternative to all this. That is love.
Isolation requires me to proactively love you (there is no other way of loving), for example, calling on the phone, waving from a window, sending a text and more with the conscious intention of love. It requires you to proactively love me. Individuals in fear do not love accidentally. Love requires a conscious choice when fear is present.
Do you mindlessly distract yourself with food, television, or games in your isolation? With obsessions, compulsions, or addictions? Are they satisfying? These are the things that isolate you from yourself as well as from others. Do you look for things to do that are meaningful and rewarding? When you isolate yourself because you care about others, you make the big choice, the most important choice, the choice you were born to make. As you make it again and again, you move beyond the control of fear and into the territory of love, beyond the desert of emptiness and into the ocean of meaning. We were born to love one another. That is why it feels so good.
The coronavirus makes all this evident. It gives all eight billion of us opportunities to choose love instead of fear (to create authentic power) in the same context at the same time. It is the perfect gift for an emerging human species unlike any before. We are that species.
This is the miracle of the coronavirus.
Love