I think of the pandemic as one long meditation. I am an irregular practitioner myself but the pandemic has forced myself and my own thoughts upon me. It has forced me to sit or walk quietly with my life as I have lived it in contrast to the life I had hoped to live, 
The pandemic has forced me to confront the fact that I will never achieve the glories I had imagined for myself. While I am saddened by my failures and inclined to want to give up from time-to-time, I have the good fortune of being surrounded by amazing people who are working to make the world a better place and who show up for the planet and all her amazing creatures.
I understand that the country in which I reside has an extroverted, action oriented psyche that is optimistic to a fault. There is an undercurrent that perfection is possible, that the perfect world can be created. And while I don’t believe you can create perfection or create perfection on top of human and planetary barbarities (a topic for another day), I also believe that this striving is one of the reasons my culture is having such a hard time responding appropriately to the pandemic.
Sitting quietly and reflecting on our shortcomings is hard work, especially for those who do not have a practice of meditation or contemplation. In this country, once we identify a problem we want to “fix it” right away. Fortunately, the virus has other plans and we have all been dragged kicking and screaming or joyfully into time for quiet, sitting with our thoughts or letting them go and being with our true, unvarnished, ugly, and beautiful selves.
Of course, the late Marion Woodman said it best:
In our yearning to be perfect, we have mistaken perfection for wholeness. We think we cannot love ourselves until we and others meet some external standard. Depression, anxiety—in fact, most neuroses and compulsions—are ultimately a defense against loving ourselves without condition. We are afraid to look at the damp, dark, ugly yet exquisite roots of being that stretch deep into our survival chakra. We are fearful of finding that the spirit is not there, that our Home is empty, even as our outer home is empty. Yet it is in that place of survival, where the dark mother has been abandoned, that spirit longs to be embodied so that the whole body may become light. Ego wants to be the god of our own idealized projection; spirit wants to be incarnated in our humanity where it can grow in wisdom through experience.
