I am sitting here at home on my couch typing at my computer. I'm listening to Yes's album Relayer on my headphones while my wife works remotely at her standing desk. The embers of my morning Buddhist fire offering smolder on the patio. Normally I like to sit on one of my two chairs. I have a cheap cloth-over-wood-frame reclining chair where I like to relax, and in our former dining room, I have my teaching-from-home office set up, complete with adjustable office chair. Right now each of our two cats is neatly occupying one of my two favorite chairs, so being the soft-hearted guy I am, rather than kicking them off, I am relegating myself to the couch.
I'm finding quarantine time to be rather refreshing, somewhat of an improvement over my previous life! Yes, I can't leave the house, and I miss being able to go hiking in the desert, but actually inside and outside are just states of mind. My mind sitting here on the couch is no different from the one outside in the desert. I don't need to cling to the concept of outside to enjoy myself, and in fact, with the reduction in available options, I find the simplicity of life refreshing. Less stuff to cling to.
This winter I went for a two week solitary retreat at Tara Mandala retreat center in the mountains of southern Colorado. They are not as rugged and imposing as the Rockies further north, but there was still snow and very cold conditions. My cabin had a wood stove and I was provided with as much wood as anyone could possibly need. Every day I used a small hand ax to chop it into manageable pieces complete with enough for kindling. I would make a fire early in the morning upon rising and then another one at about 7pm at night which would keep the cabin cozy until the next morning.
My current quarantine situation is very much a relaxed version of my retreat over the winter, and there is a definite sacredness to it. As a result I am doing my best, despite recalcitrant streams within me, to make this time meaningful and do a lot of Buddhist practice.
On the whole, I am finding life a lot less stressful. My wife and I get to see a lot more of each other. Back when we weren't telecommuting (remember that old term!) our work schedules were pretty out of synch with each other. I would get to see her a little in the morning and a little at night, but not very much. We didn't have a single day off together! Now things are a lot more like they used to be a long time ago when I would make us dinner each night. I am enjoying this aspect.
I also never fully appreciated how strongly introverted I am. Being around other people and in social situations exerts a profound amount of stress, an amount I was not fully cognizant of, until now. I may have been a solitary meditator in a previous life, or perhaps in many previous lives! That would explain this tendency in myself somewhat.
I am also really enjoying teaching online with zoom. I have a nice home computer setup with a dual screen and touchscreen so that I can write out math for the kids. This aspect of the job is also significantly less stressful now! I normally teach middle school kids and classroom management is so much easier online than in person, thanks to a faithful mute key! I am also finding that many of the kids are themselves concentrating better in this context.
So who knows what the future holds? I know a lot of people are itching for life to return to normal, but of course life never returns to exactly where it used to be. Things are in constant flux, and now is a perfect opportunity to see this fundamental truth clearly. Personally, I wouldn't mind if things pretty much continued as is for the indefinite future, though I understand that I am not an island and that I rely on all of you for my survival. I am still using internet, electricity, water, and food (which we get delivered.) I still rely on my job, which in turn relies on countless other people, customers and employees, and these interconnections ripple outward to encompass everything and everyone.
So I see that the current oasis is just as impermanent as that which preceded it, and it will change into something else sooner or later. Just like a tide slowly rising to envelop the beach, new reality is flowing in, and will soon envelop the existing one. I am taking this time to delve deeper into myself, and I hope that others are too. On the other side, many of us will emerge older and wiser. Perhaps we can attain a critical mass to fundamentally change society into something saner. The planet is happier now that we aren't spewing so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The rat race has slowed to a crawl. Stepping outside of the machine, as we are now forced to do, we can more easily appreciate how deeply insane the current cycle of meaningless destruction is. An apt quote of favorite author Douglas Adams comes to mind:
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. - Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
