It feels like the ‘phoney war’ just now, that strange period when you know something is coming but actually life has not been that disrupted as yet. At least not as much as is likely over the coming weeks.

This morning I talked to a close friend who has a daughter with cerebral palsy. She had just been informed that if her daughter gets the virus, they would not be putting her on a ventilator. It was unclear if this was due to the difficulty of doing so or because of the limited resources and her daughter not being a priority. Given that her daughter needs close care and it is difficult to isolate her, this may amount to a death sentence. I know her and wept as my friend, over the video link, told me all this, herself in tears.

What is there we can do?

I told her I love her.

But it has been in my mind these last 24 hours - who amongst those I know will get the virus and who will die? It is not abstract this virus and whilst there are things we can do to avoid getting it, it remains something of a lottery as to who will be affected most and who will die.

So what can we do to prepare ourselves?

Sangharakshita, in The Religion of Art, writes -

‘All fear is basically hatred of death, just as every kind of hope is essentially desire for life. Desire and hatred, attraction and repulsion, are rooted in the ego-sense, in the false conception that the word ‘self’ denotes an unchanging entity separate from all other ‘selves’. The fundamental Buddhist state of mind is a state of freedom from fear because it is also a state of freedom from the ego-sense.’

Prior to the Coronavirus outbreak, I have been having some tests on my own health. Whilst it is unlikely that it amounts to anything serious, it has led me to reflect on my own mortality. What if I am in the last year of my life? The thing that has struck me most is the loss of any kind of future. Death denies us that. But if I have no future, what do I have? It throws me back on my past and on the present. Just how do I feel about the life I have lived so far? If this is it, am I happy with what I have done? It is clear to me that I have a strong sense that my life will be justified - sanctified? - by something I will do in the future. Without that sanctification, what do I have?

As Sangharakshita says, I have to let go of attraction and repulsion, craving and aversion - have to let go of the ego-sense wanting to live forever. I have to find some deeper unconditional sanctification for my life, one that doesn’t require a future or even a past.

Is it enough just to love those around us as best we can?

Saccanama