by Iwi Liss
The language school, where I teach, has been closed. Coronavirus is spreading rapidly in our little country, and even the important information about layoffs at our workplace has been put on hold. I experience headaches and a certain amount of tension in the body just thinking about all this.
So, that’s the very personal, little story about the human Iwi. There are also other stories—more pleasurable ones—such as the one about having plenty of time from now on and all the fun that can come with that.
As I have my stories about me, coronavirus, layoffs, and pleasures, so you have yours. But are my story and your stories the Reality? Or are they just fragments of Reality—the greatest parts of which are thoughts, triggering feelings and emotions, triggering new thoughts?
If so, then what is Reality? Right now it’s hearing the noise from the kitchen where my husband prepares our dinner. The sun’s rays on my face, the warm body of a cat on my leg. The breath in my chest, and sometimes a feeling, a thought, a story, the screen of my computer, the extractor hood, the whistle of the wind, the spring light in the whole room, warm colors, a glass of orange juice in the hand . . .
These are just a few elements of what is here, of what Reality is, when I’m not separated from IT. Yet Reality is even greater—it encompasses everything and extends endlessly, so one cannot even describe it. The only thing I can do is to describe those few fragments of what is here, so that you too can open your eyes—look, listen, be here and wake up from the story in your head.
When people spin stories and live solely in them, they sooner or later become overwhelmed by the claustrophobic feeling of this spinning and thinking. It is not surprising that they can hardly sleep at night or commit ill-considered actions in the daytime. They lack presence and contact with reality, living in a vacuum they themselves have created through more and more thinking.
My colleagues live in the story about coronavirus, and if they aren’t talking or reading about it, they’re thinking about it and suffering—a compulsive, sick behavior that they are not even aware of. The sleeping ones live, as Heraclitus says, in a thousand different, intimate worlds. The awakened ones have one world in common—the one world, here and now. Are you ready to live in the one Reality? If yes, it is now.
And that does not mean that you ignore the part of the reality in which coronavirus is. On the contrary—with a receptive, open mind, you actually see more and are more helpful than all those who indulge in the depressing flow of the coronavirus story—those who are so easily overlooking themselves and the whole world around them.
