I’ve been scanning the internet for wisdom from the usual voices of reason that I value. Those usual voices are quiet. Perhaps not because they have nothing to say but because they said it all a while ago. We just weren’t listening. Perhaps now is not the time for them to reach out. Perhaps now is the time they will all be reaching in. Today there was news from Arundhati Roy. A devastating account of life in India right now. She writes about how pandemics force us to leave behind everything about the world we knew and imagine an entirely new world. She encourages us to travel light in this transition. Why would we ever want things to return to a so called “normal”?
How do we imagine a new world? I think everything we need to know has already been said. We just have to get on with it, saving as many lives as we can along the way. As Camus wrote in The Plague “But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”
So to help me find the courage to keep going, I decided to print the faces of all the voices I most value and put them on the wall above my desk. Somehow it feels slightly less forlorn, for now.