I haven’t been on the site for a few days and I’ve missed all of your inspiring posts. While I have made many “mistakes” (or are they?) in my life, I’m grateful to have landed where I have landed. In this time of crisis, as I care for an adult child, I have a roof over my head, enough food and a small steady income. I think about the millions in our country and elsewhere who are being thrown out of work temporarily by the virus crisis–most often low-paid service workers on whom we depend every day. How are they to survive? Why are they the sacrificial lambs? Perhaps this crisis will bring about some fundamental changes in how we operate–but I wouldn’t count on it. That would be something to be grateful for.

Again, a tricky one. It depends. The person suffering may have no space for beauty, just managing the pain. The person suffering may need beauty or hope if it is offered, just to survive (I think of the residents of Leningrad who during that 900-day siege when they were starving, frozen, with dead bodies lying in the street, turned to the music of Shostakovich for a glimmer of something different). If one has a good practice (Buddhist, for example), one learns that beauty and suffering co-exist in life and that suffering is to be expected in life.
But for me, the ability to see and fully accept this would require deep practice and I have not put in the time or the effort. . Other faiths have different ways of presenting the paradox and if one has been trained in that faith then it’s easier (I suspect) to see beauty and suffering. are life.

This is a tough one. Thanks for the posts below which help me begin to think about it. My life at the moment, in retirement, is a lot different and a lot harder than what I had imagined it would be. I am changing though as I learn to accept it, but there is always that feeling of “what happened here.?” Why did I let it go so wrong?
Some of it was stuff I could control (if I had been emotionally up to the task) –it wasn’t a natural disaster–so I’m being forced inside to re-evaluate. It’s a struggle every day.

we were very poor as I was growing up. My mother was so generous to those who had even less. She would be the sole person at the graveside of a homeless itinerant who had died in our town; she would give clothing to a mentally disturbed neighbor who would not respond well; the list is much longer. Once, as a selfish teenager, I asked her “why do you bother doing this?” Her reply, “because I’m a human being” is one I will always remember. .I She had lived through a rebellion, a civil war, had witnessed brutal evictions in the early years of the 20th century when the ramshackle homes were destroyed with battering rams. I miss her.

The posts are fantastically helpful today, which is why I wish I was sitting in a circle with all of you (well, I am–in a virtual circle). I am a longtime immigrant (over 50 years) who has forgotten her roots (or rather, I rejected them because of associations with poverty and inferiority–the old colonization trick). Those roots came with warmth, kindness, generosity, magic and inspiring mythology, and I married into and opted for something harder (probably better boundaries, let it be said) and based in the head rather than the heart. So it’s an existential question for me as I’ve had stuff on my doorstep (as one writer said) for several years now, which is bringing me to that realization.
My practice will be to return to the warmth, kindness and generosity that nurtured me when i was little. I can begin today with a small step. I love the references to Lent. How well I remember the huge sacrifice it was to give up candy (that was the obvious “penance” when I was little) for 40 days! But it was a good discipline and practice, also abandoned by me. Thank you all for writing.

I share the experience of the mothers below with difficult adult children; we are impacted by the chaos and havoc the situation can wreak. However, I have not reacted well and have caused additional damage that I can now see. I am beginning to find some power by looking within myself and asking what I could have done in a different way, if anything? Kevin’s post is extremely helpful. Thank you, Kevin. But it’s not always easy to be patient with the pain and hurt underlying the anger and dysfunction Also, the incredible sadness that I used to feel about the situation. It’s daily grieving. The upside is that things are improving as I keep myself in check, but it is incredibly challenging at times. Not getting lost in it all and forgetting how to live is also very difficult.

No doubt this, too, will pass, but I wasn’t expecting an invisible unknown virus to throw the world into such panic and chaos at the moment, whether warranted or not. Although it’s been a while now, I have spent time in a 3rd world country where one really knew that life was fragile. Here we believe, or are led to believe, that there is a way to control everything, or that there should be a solution to every problem; Our expectations, which give us hope and resilience, are high; our disappointments great.