Limited and Limitless: What The Pandemic is Teaching Me about Space.
These last few weeks have had me thinking a lot about space.
Because space is a reality that is so fundamental to life, it's easy to forget about how it affects us all until it has been restricted or altered in some way. Space and time are the two most basic dimensions that define what it means to be a human.
All human relationships need space to survive.
There must be "space in our togetherness" to paraphrase Kahlil Gibran. It's a delicate balance that we've put a lot of pressure on these last two months. Of course, in many obvious ways, we are not together right now. We are all very separate. We are separated from each other's faces, because of the masks we all wear in public. We are separated from each other's touch since we have not hugged many of our extended family or friends for a long time. We are also separated from each other in much more dangerous ways.
We are separated from each other by fear. We are all uncertain about our safety and direction, so we go about trying to solve this challenge with the method that works for most of our obstacles, more effort. We spend time reading articles, watching videos, reading more news. We act on what we believe to be credible intelligence. We get the mask ( or not ). We stay home and work ( or not ). These actions give us back a small feeling of control. We have a plan… trouble is, not all our neighbors have the same plan. It seems like everyone has a different fight-or-flight response to the fear. I'll be honest, I don't have very gracious thoughts about the people who aren't responding like me. The story I make up about them is that they are blind to the harm they are causing just because they want to grasp on to a world that doesn't exist anymore. If only they would think like me everything would be better! In my mind, I have created distance; space between them and me.
Adding to the complexity of our current dilemma is our country is going to vote later this year on who should be the head leader in this next season of our American experiment. Who will be able to influence enough people to row in the same direction? I just want you to take a moment and ask yourself, how would you rate your hope in the future in our country on a scale to 1 to 10? Why would you give it that number?
Does it have anything to do with how much trust you have in your fellow Americans, or is it focused on how much confidence you have in one specific American?
The third way we are separated is, to me, the most curious, the most troubling, and the most hopeful ( I think ). To try and give you a bit of context for this new kind of space, I'm going to make a quick and very crude summary of technology in the last 500 years.
A vital piece of technology followed the Protestant reformation 500 years ago, it was the Gutenberg Press. This printing press allowed anyone to access the source material that gave priests in the church authority to speak for God. It gave The People the Bible. The written word is a system of codifying language just like the spoken word ( duh, right?), you need a coder and a decoder. The press made a single decoder (the pope/priest) obsolete, therefore making everyone potentially a decoder ( depending on the time/experience you had to research the material ). This created a massive crisis of authority. A proliferation of "de-nominations" followed, as did a whole lot of arguments, violence, and death. These events changed the western concept of God and theology forever. It changed God by changing language.
At about the same time, the same things were happening to our understanding of space. Most notably with Copernicus, who proposed that this plane we existed on might not be the center of our solar system, the "heavens" were not a celestial reality but a physical reality. This statement suggested that the prevailing belief in a geocentric universe based on the authority of scripture was wrong (or at least misunderstood). Far later, when Edwin Hubble discovered that we were not even at the center of our own galaxy, let alone our own solar system, he even further disrupted our grasp on space. Add in the work of Einstein, Hawking, Heisenberg, and others who contribute to further demolishing our concepts of space and time. We begin to see that space is not only something vast and expanding but small and sub-atomic. Which brings me to the internet. (Still with me? I'm getting back to the pandemic, I promise!)
The internet is on the level with the Gutenberg press, in that it does for space what The Press did for language. It has invented a way for humans to be together in a virtual space while remaining physically in separate places. We can communicate, feel emotions, affect significant political changes, play, and trade all virtually. More individual people access more information than has ever existed in history. We each have several online profiles working for (or against) us right now in a virtual space. This new reality, whether we are conscious of it or not, takes energy. If you have spent any amount of time in the last two months on more than one zoom meeting during your day, I think you know what I mean (if you don't check out this article https://www.bbc.com/workolife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting )
. If you have opened Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter recently looking for a distraction and finding yourself more tired, sad, or angry than before opening it, you know what I mean. The internet has given us unprecedented access to each other's space and information, but it obfuscates the meaning and context of it all. It has a flattened value of all interactions making them effectively equal. My space for processing weighty political discourse shares the same space as cat-videos, which shares the same space as the current refugee crisis, which shares the same space as advertising for downloading that app that will do the whatever-thing-I-can't live without.
There is no separation. No "space in our togetherness." The result is disorientation and disorder since there is no central authority. All the virtual-togetherness has had the effect of making us feel more separate.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a catalytic event that accelerated the issues we were already dealing with under the surface. It shut down the world and forced most people to accept their virtual selves and begin to think about how to integrate them or not integrate them into their lives. The imposition of wearing masks in public and plexiglass dividers at the grocery store has made us more aware of each other and our space. The pandemic has made us remember that we are indeed connected to each other. My hope comes from this self-evident revelation.
The spiritual discipline of fasting teaches us that if we want to be more connected to something we love, we must remove it for a time. Counter-logically, we create distance between us and our desire to give it a higher value.
Perhaps the longer we go attempting to fill the gap made by this pandemic with virtual substitutions, the more we prolong our suffering.
Perhaps finding appropriate ways to disconnect more from the disembodied virtual world and confine ourselves to our immediate and local space will give us the connection we crave in the future.
The monastics believe that all they will ever need of God can be found in their cell (their sparsely furnished rooms). Maybe everything you need is in your neighborhood right now too? So far, at our house, we have received free plants for our garden, books to read, cookies to eat, groceries for weeks, and more wine than we can drink in a month! All of this from our neighbors! We have also given away wine, sourdough bread, cakes, milk, sugar, salsa, and artwork. We're becoming a beautiful little village over here in Broomfield Heights! We're making space for each other!
The pandemic has certainly felt apocalyptic at times, this is true. However, the original meaning of the word "apocalypse" was not about the end of the world. Apocalypse comes from the ancient Greek word meaning "to uncover or reveal." This pandemic has revealed a ton about who we are as humans, what we want, and how we are connected in space.