By Martin Vogel
I’ve been writing about the COVID emergency at my new blog, The Unknowing Project. I began this as a space to develop thoughts around the question of unknowing as a stance for our times, which has since become the task of all of us as old certainties have collapsed. One of the themes that is emerging is about cultivating equanimity.
This is from a month ago:
“Fierce equanimity looks into a potential abyss and steps back into a grounded responsibility. We don’t know what the next weeks and months will hold. But we each have a part to play in mitigating the virus. That part entails apprehending it with due seriousness and changing our behaviour accordingly.”
Read the full post: The awakening.
And this is from today:
“A lot of what we’re feeling at the moment is grief. Some of the emotional response to the Prime Minister’s condition exemplifies this. The laying low of the nation’s leader symbolises not just the loss of our sense of security but an anticipatory grief about what lies ahead. That it should happen not just to our Prime Minister but to somebody as bumptious and boosterish as Boris Johnson pulls the rug from whatever lingering denial we may have been labouring under.”
Read the full post: Nobody knows anything.
Please be in touch if you have any reflections. At a time like this, it can be hard to find one’s moorings. We might respond in different ways: perhaps with a frenzy of productivity or perhaps berating ourselves for not being productive enough.
My blogpost on trauma has been getting a lot of traffic. We are collectively going through a traumatising experience and it’s important to know where you can get the right kind of help.
If you would like to talk, please get in touch.
Image courtesy Javardh at Unsplash.
