A few weeks into the first Covid lockdown I cycled into the centre of Cardiff to pick up some medicine. The roads were empty, the shopping streets largely deserted, and the few shoppers wore masks. Seeing the strangeness of the world the lockdown had created interrupted what had, till then, been a larkish sense of enjoying an unexpected holiday.
Covid became very real as we struggled to keep on top of my son’s education and friends in the NHS described their relentless challenges. People died. All the same, looking back as we mark five years ago since the first lockdown, it’s hard to believe it all really happened: that normal life shut down so completely and the simplest activities were risky and regulated.
The main lesson I took from Covid was that the things I take for granted depend on a host of conditions I can’t control: not just that the air is free of fatal viruses, but that weather avoids extremes, the economy is stable, we aren’t at war and life will go on as what we call normal. The starting point for Buddhist teachings is that these conditions are changing all the time. The most basic condition for all of us is our body, and human life, as Buddhism understands it, is a state of both knowing and not quite accepting that our bodies are impermanent and vulnerable to things like viruses.
The Diamond Sutra, one of the most famous Buddhist texts, goes a step further and asks us to see the world as a mirage, a water bubble, a dream or a flash of lightning: something that lacks any fixed or abiding essence, however substantial it looks. We catch a glimpse of that when our assumptions fail. The real purpose of mindfulness is slowing down enough to recognise the impermanent, insubstantial nature of reality and the suffering that comes when we ignore that.
The anniversary of Covid falls at another time when old certainties are melting, this time in the international order, and perhaps these lessons can help us now. Recognising impermanence connects us to others because it affects us all. It’s part of the human condition we all share. Lockdown enclosed us in our separate support bubbles, but knowing that others were having to do the same connected us. Covid was a strange and awful time, but I miss that sense of connection.
