1. Remember how much lip service was paid to mental health in the last couple of years? It supposedly had ‘parity’ with physical health in government thinking, despite being woefully underfunded. Well, the past month has blown all those platitudes out of the water. As long as we can keep people alive, the mental wellbeing of all is secondary. (pic:Tony Clerkson/Shutterstock)
You have to start to ask, what makes life worth living? If families can’t grieve together because of the theoretical risk, is that tolerable? Already suicides are rocketing, and as economics is a huge part of this, what about the cost of treating mental scars in the aftermath?
I am wondering about the psychological sustainability of advanced cultures where the need to preserve life trumps living life to this extent. In poorer countries today and here in previous times, people have soldiered on despite dying in large numbers in pandemics, less able to shield themselves from the blunt reality of being mortal.
These events are a unfortunately a regular reality of human history. If people will live in such huge settlements then bacteria will occasionally move in too and chow down on our insides. Perhaps the drama of WW1 was a more engaging story to tell and re-tell than the pandemic that followed it, but ‘Spanish’ flu killed many times more and could have done with some memorialising too.
In many Southern nations, where millions still die every year from malaria, life is cheap. Here, physical life has become so valuable and spiritual life so impoverished that we will go to any lengths to contain a disease that might kill 0.3% of those that get it, while our strategies for containing it could inflict mental illnesses on far more.
2. Poorer nations soldier on because they have to. They don’t enjoy being more in touch with the reality of life and death. Given the choice, they would abolish disease too. What motivates against the lockdown is the inward cry: I must not suffer. Or if I have to suffer, it must be up to a point I understand. to the extent that I feel morally uplifted by it. Any further than that, I feel victimised.
We are used to designing our lives how we want. Choice, for us, is seen not as a luxury, but a right. The right to have things the way we want. But what is demanded of us now is something our culture has almost abandoned: the idea of sacrifice; to put constraints on your own needs and wishes for the good of others: people we don’t know, people of different generations.
So far we have been trying to sacrifice and not suffer, to find ways to enjoy the lockdown. But we have reached the point where it becomes grinding and dispiriting. The question now is, can I suffer well? Sacrifice is not some blissful, holistic journey. It’s something to be endured.
Buddha said ‘life is suffering’. Things will constantly change and conflict with our priorities. Everything we value will slip through our fingers and pass away. We suffer because we constantly argue with the reality of this. The lockdown is an opportunity to observe your suffering objectively as it plays out (in this, we could not be more united).
In one way, we do have a choice between two sufferings: break the rules and maybe cause physical suffering and/or death for yourself and others. Or stay at home and accept the suffering of your limited new reality.
Tom George 