I don’t know if this is premature, but it feels like the health crisis is coming to a close. T.S. Eliot tells us, in his poem “The Wasteland”, that “April is the cruelest month.” I feel the pain of it, because we don’t know whether the crisis is over or we just have a temporary reprieve. Like many people I know, I’m exhausted. A medical professional friend of mine suggested that this may be post-crisis exhaustion.
Whatever the future holds, I’ve been reflecting on the past two years. It’s been hard for me, but it’s also been good in some ways. As a spiritual person, I treated it as a long spiritual retreat in my own home. It’s given me time to reflect on who I am.
It was often hard, in the before time, to think clearly. I was often caught up too much in the social chaos of humanity. This phantasmagoria of human passion and stubbornness, joy and wrath, love and conflict, can be all-consuming. It’s easy to become possessed by the phantasms of popular culture, fanatical political loyalties, and religious squabbling. Stepping back from it, I was able return to something very important to me: myself.
That may sound self-centered, but it isn’t. Who we are is important. We are our values, our actions, our creativity, and our passions. Humanity is nothing without all the humans who make it up. Who we are is critical to the human project. It’s impossible to harmonize with others without first knowing ourselves well enough to understand how we might fit together with others to form communities.
Immanuel Kant said, in his book “The Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals”, that actions are not good if we only do them for our own gain. If shopkeepers only keep their prices fair to get people to buy from them, they aren’t really being good, just self-serving. It’s only when they keep their prices fair because it’s the right thing to do that that they’re truly good.
If that’s true, knowing who we are and knowing our values is the first step towards goodness. We must make those conscious decisions to do what is best for everyone. If that understanding of self is muddled by social pressure, we fall back into the trap of doing what we do because we want others to like us, rather than doing it because it’s right. Peer pressure is a dangerous thing, as we know from studying the history of authoritarian regimes. The only escape is to take Socrates’s advice and “know thyself”.
As hard as it was, and as much suffering as it brought with it, the health crisis had a silver lining for me. It allowed me to step out of that phantasmagoria of human buffeting, to stop being batted around like a pinball by social pressures, and to really know who I am and what I believe.