If you start flipping through TV channels today, you are bound to land upon a disaster movie, and not just the infamous Contagion. Just now I landed on the end of Spielberg’s version of The War of the Worlds. You might find one of my other favorites such as Twister, or any of the Godzilla movies. The other night I caught World Invasion: Battle Los Angeles.
I am sure that this is not an accident.
More of us are are home flipping through channels with hopes of escaping the nightmare outside our doors right now. We are held captive by the screen and its remote. Isn’t it better to be thrust into an imaginary world that is being transformed by some disaster or another? The question is what can we learn from watching these kinds of stories.
Like many stories, there is a pattern. The people who survive are the ones who have sorted through their personal piles of excrement enough to be able to work with others for the greater good. Think about Twister. Bill Paxton’s character needs to come to terms that he still loves his old Storm Chasing partner before he allows himself to follow his passion of hunting down tornadoes and finding a way to collect data from their centers to warn others.
Maybe we should think about our time social distancing as a chance to get to know ourselves a bit better, a chance to work out some buried crap that is so easily ignored while we run in hamster balls on treadmills in our everyday lives. It is definitely a chance to get to know those we live with better, a chance to form better relationships with them.
Living through this pandemic is like a hard reset on a computer. It’s giving us a chance to figure ourselves out. We just need to take this opportunity.
Namaste
Meandering Through Midlife 
You must be logged in to post a comment.