This is something that we can think about to live life more normally when Covid tends to make it abnormal. We are Buddhist, and for a Buddhist, when life becomes jeopardized, it is a karmic blessing to practice virtues we speak and learn. There is something about Covid we forgot to pay respects to. This is a story that begins from my parents.
With deteriorating health conditions, my parents flew to Paro on 6th January, and soon after began to visit hospital in Thimphu. It had been a long wait before getting flight tickets for the parents. Winter is a time when everyone travels for holidays.
Just after completing mother’s hospital visits, Thimphu went into blackout period, with news breaking from Rubesa Wangdiphodrang of a Covid outbreak. It was the beginning of a long wait, cocooned inside the building to a routine of meals and prayers and television and increasing cases of positive in the community everywhere.
This is perhaps one of the longest holiday without cattle and fieldwork, without living a farmer’s day. If it wasn’t for the outbreak they could have flown back long time ago, and begun many tedious tasks.
After over a month in Thimphu, looking out of the window to the day everyday, there is a relief as capital relaxes on the Covid19 situation. There is a promise for better days, and promise for a return home after some final visits to hospital.
While remaining indoors is easier for aged people who live like it is a ritual retreat for prayers and recitations, it is devastating to hear of people undergoing anxiety, stress and depressing restlessness. My father completed volumes of reading scriptures and mother in recitations.
If Covid is going to stay and arrive again, we must prepare to begin a Ngondro practice, some serious scriptural reading and mantra recitations. It’s going to be a retreat that will impact us spiritually, transforming us to understand life from a spiritual perspective. We will be able to find meaning or meaninglessness in what life is all about.
For civil servants who had some training in mindfulness meditation or others who are taught meditation practices must spend longer and regular hours of practice in a day. Sometimes, when times seem to disrupt our routine, it is providing a routine that must be lived naturally. Lockdowns and blackouts, containment and quarantine are moments for us to be physically less chaotic, moments to rest and calm from chaos we attend to otherwise. This can be one way we can tame our mind to be calm, to attain the natural equipoise spiritual masters teach as a state of freedom from chaos.
But, unfortunately, even for me, with knowledge of this advantage, I get swayed emotionally. I yearn for freedom to work and walk the places like before not knowing I am yearning for chaos. It is pathetic that chaos has become our habitual tendencies and anything that tends to lessen our chaotic desires becomes painful to us.
Covid is a blessing that brings clam to our chaos. As a Buddhist, understanding impermanence, practicing meditation, living in modesty and calmness is part of our life. Covid only opens this opportunity to remain alienated from people who only stir chaos, alienated from movements, and bring more attention to lesser thoughts. If we can wait patiently within our homes to live life like a hermit, Covid is going to become a blessing we can never have, an antidote to our chaotic romance which is contradictory to what is spiritual and sane.
