Italy is waking up. Walkers, energised, make their way up my street. A neighbour exercises in his yard to dance music. Children run, dogs bark. The nearby lake, usually crossed by boats, remains still. But people, people are active again. After returning from the UK, I watch from home 'quarantena', with a week to go, but it's a joyful sight. After all the tragedy experienced here, it’s a release to see locals stretching their legs, enjoying some fresh air and visiting family.
The world is watching as each country finds its way to the new normal. Commentators and conversations share how strange it has been under lockdown, and in some ways a pause we needed.
For others, it seems to have been more a case of getting on with the task at hand, fulfilling duties and waiting for freedom, or, engaged entirely in a struggle to survive. All the while, there's been bankers and investors, glued to financial market screens, watching the market and waiting for the bottom.
And yes, the world needs well-functioning financial markets and by definition, a marketeer seeks to buy low and sell high, just as I need to breathe and sigh and abide in my awareness and one day may wonder when is the right time to sell my home.
In a way, as a writer, I too am ‘looking for the bottom’. Beneath the noise, when the dust settles, and in our infinite capacity to adapt, life will go on, we will continue to make a world that ‘works for us’. And the fight to shift that understanding will go on too — the great campaign to shake humanity and remind us all that we are disconnected and our biosphere may turn us into fertiliser one day if we continue this hubris.
But at bottom, we share a largely unrealised phenomenal capacity to tap into our connectedness, with all of life, to realise together, just how immensely beautiful this world could be.
As we return to the ‘new normal’, may a great many more of us make the time, space and quiet, in our daily lives, to, as Adyashanti succinctly counsels, ‘stop, let be, let go, and abide’, and in so doing, come to deeply intuitively understand our true nature. Attuning to the wisdom beneath our delusions, we may come to understand our deeper values, our amazing capacities alongwith our frailties — who we truly are — and our potentiality to help remake the world we share with all life.