Member-only story
As the world turns a calendar page to yet another month of this unwavering crisis, some of us have been in a lockdown for two weeks, some for a month, and others even longer. Daunting and endless as this confinement might seem, an even more frustrating question keeps coming up. How was our life different before? Were we free from the dark internal demons that are now haunting us, staring us straight in the face?
Start with confinement. Bound to our house, waking up every morning to the sameness reminiscent of a house arrest, unable to get out, scared to step outside, bored out of our minds, our only hope is that someone/something will end our misery soon. It’s always someone else that’s responsible for our well-being. We never had the audacity to be the protagonists of our own creations. Externally we had a myriad of distractions: our careers, making ends meet, social life, goals. After all we were going somewhere, right? Or were we? How free were we before this virus gave us a pause? Did we really exercise the power of our free will when we had it?
Life kept going by in a blur of unconscious moves for most of us. Indoctrinated to a religion or a belief system before even becoming conscious, tied the man or woman of our programmed dreams, obsessed by jobs we always pursued only to get stuck, we are constructs of the…