Sonder: [n] The realization that each random passer-by has a life as vivid and as complex as your own.

So, heaven has given us to live in interesting times. 

March 2020: Relentless shopping has been mitigated to a ‘once-a-week’ liberty. Fleeting entities rush in and out of insignificant shops, dragging two mountains of pent-up anxiety on the insignificant floor that has seen one too many insignificant, burdened shoe-prints. Afraid of their own shadows, impermanent mortals attempt chiasmic detachment; towing a yellow taped line of demarcation with some 3 or 6 feet apart – an awkward, unaccustomed dance between evolving, complex science and simple public health guidelines; a failing choreography amidst a rising distrust of health authorities. They do this, but not only from a communal silent agreement dripping in blind obedience.

None wish to stand too close to the unforeseen jaws of Death. 

All these impermanent entities isolate themselves, caged in their hysterical paranoia of mistrust and doubts and so find it pointless to help the forlorn man sitting outside the shop. Frayed garments and afraid minds that had evidently seen better days; yet decrepitly adorned by a somebody who will probably never experience it again. This most dismal sight of usual self-quarantine seems to be the only one which has remained unchanged. The better-off finding it pointless to help, to tear away this penalty over the disempowered for simply being disempowered, to tear away the muting, societal mask brushing off those jinxed by misfortune as a mere passer-by. 

That societal mask fragmenting people like us into inconsequential, hollow sub-humans; punishable for the state of utter misery.

Instead, Earth’s temporary occupiers sheathe that mask tightly around their haughty heads every morning, muffling out the sounds and glances of Earth’s humbled and helpless creatures, muffling out their desperate pleas and desperate efforts, muffling out the screams of common sense, of humanity. Let sleeping dogs lie, they said.

As usual, the poorest and weakest suffer most. It is simply pathetic.

June: The deep dyed lack of consideration and the deeper dyed lack of compassion has soured the Earth a mutated, sunless grey. Giving us the opportunity to see the unnervingly true colors of those we called our defenders in this time of crisis. Sinners playing as saints. Followed by the urgent downpour of June’s rain; scrubbing and scouring against the top layer of tyranny and violent streets, protesting with society’s anxiety in desperate pleads to revive the promising colors and vibrant vivacities of humanity. Raining down pitifully to find that little slice of honest compassion sealed shut by the misery of a disease and the disease of racism that plagues the planet. 

To revive Earth as we knew it.

September: Instead, unheeded mortals block the rain’s feeble attempt to restore Earth’s artistry with a dark sea of shrouded ignorance, shrouding their guilty conscience; shrouding themselves from untold truths of being hostages of stupidity’s reckless precepts. For the cluster of young juveniles waiting for their bus, laughing in heedless symphony, it’s all a game. A game of Russian Roulette that triggers the blithe confidence of immortality; the blithe confidence that they will be standing for the same red bus next year. Yet one sentient life form stops laughing and stares at his hands, wondering if this instrument of so much heedless taking in past years are now carriers of his own demise.

The Mardi Gras of our product-addicted age is over leaving an atmosphere of a morning-after for the Earth; communal hangovers slowly sobering the planet. In the first gusts of wintered February, the fascinated reach and infatuated touch for goods draped in a mesmerizing silk of indulgence entranced our unbeknown orbs. Unbeknownst to its dissipating value in the months to come. The month of March set in motion a certain hesitance to touch as freely and as uncaringly as mortals did in the past; encased in gingerly reluctance as though touching the skin of a corpse. Chastened, subdued, sober, watchful.

Man plans and God laughs.

A time of hubris; through our ravaging and violation of nature and imperious walk upon the moon, every other species cringe from Earth’s residents as ecosystems die. From the mortal’s perspective, this infectious disease is the cause of the world’s disorder. But seen from history’s perspective, from eternity’s perspective, humanity itself is the deadliest disease. A virus that sucks the blood of the planetary host, devouring restlessly, invading relentlessly, until the system of perfection, the planet which we vampirize, sickens and dies.

How humorous.

So small an enemy to have overthrown our prestigious world; an arch-nemesis too miniscule to even be visible to our naked, conceited eyes. The Corona bears its own magisterial crown and imperial scepter; this insubstantial nothing, this almost nothingness that is chewing away at any sense of sangfroid relief, is now king of the world: the planet, his palace and its entities, his slaves. A divine irony. The smallest members of nature’s kingdom are used by History’s ‘moral of the story’ to strike against a destructive and unjust megastructure of oppression and pride and so the mighty mortals are now, the helpless and humbled. 

December: It is now when we contemplate the wicked threat of a meaningless and eternal nothingness; to be consigned to oblivion. Death is a normal and natural part of our frail human reality but not once in history, were all of humankind forced to face the dilemma of two equally fatal alternatives: to go out with one foot in the grave or to stay in and wait for death’s knock on your door – where the avoidance of one ensures encountering the harm of the other. 

Between the devil and the deep blue sea. 

Many of us live lives of quiet desperation and go to our graves with the song still in us. Yet a void replaces a soul; fear and sorrow paralyze our blasé, spoilt world, enkindled by lives that were not supposed to taste death yet. Too early. 

Or were we too late?

In spite of this, Eternity’s ceaseless clock continues with its cycles of birth, growth, flourishing, fertility and death – its manner and time determined by the best of judges. Lost in doubt, we stare at that clock in hopes for a presence of mind where one experiences true happiness and tranquility; devoid of any inconsolable pity or fear.

January 2021: We all sit and wait for a catharsis.