We can learn by example or by lack. Growing up in a household where food was important, where we always ate homecooked meals and my parents entertained a lot, this culture imprinted itself on me. I learned by example. Growing up in a family where love was inferred, not so much expressed in words or by physical touch, I learned through lack. I hug my children a lot, and I always tell them that I love them.
Our world has become exponentially more virtual in our homebound little Corona world than it had already been before this crisis, now that so many of us study and work and meet virtually. We conduct business via Zoom, partake in online exercise classes and museum tours, see our doctors via TeleMedicine, and organize virtual cocktail hours with friends.
Temporarily that may be acceptable, useful and even necessary. However, often after a crisis certain social changes don’t revert back to the way they were before (and that may be an opportunity for conscious change). Think of the increased surveillance, paranoia and airport security after 9/11. It never really left us.
Post Covid-19 we really need to be aware of this. Screen relationships, meetings, consultations, workshops, and classes lack something essential. They lack not only touch but also direct eye-to-eye contact. Have you noticed that you can never look a person directly in the eyes on Zoom or Skype or Facetime? The satisfaction of meeting someone for a cup of coffee, of getting together for a glass of wine or dinner with friends, celebrating holidays with your extended family over a wonderful meal, just cannot be replicated virtually.
Because Covid-19 prevention precautions demand social distancing, the take-away could easily become that we must fear human contact because of potential pathogen transmission and that a virtual existence is safer. This crisis is teaching me by lack how crucial personal touchy feely eye-to-eye in-person contact is to my emotional wellbeing and general satisfaction with life. We have increasingly become fearful of life (see a previous post- live a little - on that). Life itself is not totally safe as we must interact with people, pathogens, plants, animals, the air, the machines we create and travel in, lest we become emotional robots housed inside and existing in a virtual world. And in the end we still all die no matter what.
How do you want to live the rest of your life after this virus crisis is over? Your choice is to get back out into the world or live a virtual shadow of a life. Feeling safe requires strengthening your own inner resources, your immune system, your mind, your body. Will you live in fear or in love, with people or without? This crisis is an opportunity to question how far we wish to take the virtualization of this experience we call life.