COVID-19 Interest Group

                                        May 8, 2020               

     Dear Rotarians

The world has changed and will not go back to what it was before.
We all know this at heart.
We are grieving for what we have lost, whether we know it or not, and are uncertain as to what our world will be in the future.
We go along with the wish for a return to “normal”.
There is no normal, there never has been, the world is ever- changing.
All plagues have done this, and will do so again.
We have an abundance of solitude to contemplate the fragility of human life and the dilemmas of the human condition.
Our vulnerability and the ephemeral nature of our existence is drawn in stark relief.
Like a skull on our desk, the plague is a Memento Mori, placing us all in the position of evaluating our lives and our relationships to those we love in the face of our inevitable death, as well as evaluating how we want to live the days remaining to us.
We understand our privilege makes no difference anymore.
Our sense of importance as a species wilts in the face of the fact nature doesn’t care.
We are going to be in this for a very long time, especially so for the oldest amongst us.

So, how do we cope?
We learn to savior life’s everyday opportunities in the here-and-now. Like our morning coffee, or the beauty of a bumblebee on a flower.
We put our petty irritations with our loved ones aside, realizing how short life is.
We benefit from facing our mortality and the lessons doing so can teach us.
We allow for our creativity to invent things to do, to make, to read, to learn, to help others, to learn new skills, to dream.
We help the young.
We understand that being sad, anxious, and irritable at times, is part of being human, especially at times like these.
We savior and enrich all of our relationships, and are open to making new ones.
We forgive.
We wait.