What Am I Here For?

What Am I Here For?

— -Neal Lemery 4/22/2020

The other day I was watching a webinar on responding to this plague, this contagion that has rampaged across the world. Our limited response has been quarantine, basic sanitation, and waiting in our homes.

Much of our familiar routines have been put on hold. Our daily social and economic activities are either “on pause” or being transformed into video and other technological methods. We are learning to live in a different way.

The webinar involved highly intelligent, experienced and thoughtful people. A former president, governors of large states inundated with this crisis, thoughtful medical and other scientifically trained experts and thinkers. The conversations were rich, insightful, as well as comforting to me. Intelligent people were working on these problems, developing approaches and methodologies, being rational and thoughtful.

In one segment, a panel of epidemiological experts gathered, and I was expecting profound wisdom on viruses, containment, the search for the “cure”. What is the most important thing each of us can do was the question posed?

“We are all healers,” one of the experts said. “Making a human connect with someone else is the most profound, the most effective act we can take in dealing with these problems.”

Another expert added that taking five minutes to deeply, intensely listen to someone, to spend that small amount of time focused on another person’s thoughts and concerns, is profound and highly effective.

Their answers weren’t looking at the intricacies of public health strategies or developing new scientific approaches and techniques, though the webinar participants did speak to those vital actions. Those steps are important and ongoing. Yet, we were reminded that the most important thing we bring to any situation, any crisis, is our humanity.

Being kind, attentive, and being focused on the needs and concerns of another human being, making that very human, intimate connection, does the most to change the situation, to empower each of us, and to bring about meaningful change. All the medicine, the technology, the social change actions that are coming forward now, that’s all important. But, not as important as our task to be compassionate, to be loving, to be caring, and to simply and intensely focus on what we all need and want, to be cared about, to be valued as a person, to be deeply loved.

The words took me aback, made me pause.

Throughout this crisis, I have been asking myself, what can I do? What is my role here?

After all, it is a time to be involved, to add myself in as a responder, as a caregiver, as part of the solution. That is what citizens do in time of societal chaos and challenge. We step up to the plate, take on a task we are good at, and move ahead with others for the common good.

“We are all healers.”

“Be the compassionate deep listener.”

“Be a ‘communitarian’.”

Ah, the word of the year, this “communitarian”. Caring about and being part of the community, being focused on our role as humanitarians living together.

This crisis again calls us to think of ourselves as citizens of the world. We are so very interconnected. Our collective ability to weave our economic, educational, and cultural lives together throughout the planet is one of the profound lessons of today. The good that we do, and the destructive consequences of that interconnectedness that makes this pandemic so destructive, and so universal, offer lessons in that interconnectedness. We are truly reliant upon each other which is such a big part of our lives now. We are world citizens, and we are very interdependent with each other.

The transmission of the virus shows that interconnectedness, and that we are all affected by how everyone else, even one person, thinks and acts.

The scientific evidence of global climate change has been compelling and strong, yet many of our actions and our thinking has not really changed because we tend to not think that taking small steps to ensure a healthier, more productive outcome will really make a difference.

This pandemic is teaching us otherwise. Avoiding crowds, practicing social distancing, and staying home avoids contagion and literally saves lives. Simple steps can be highly effective, if we all act together, coming together as one force, one movement towards a safer world.

This lesson has been lost to us, but now it has become real, taught to us in the daily statistics of illness and death. The pandemic has forced us to pay attention, and to learn some basic life-altering lessons.

It is all on me. That’s where this conversation comes back to. I can watch the news, sitting in my living room, passive and inactive. At the end of the day, I’ve accomplished nothing. I am not being the active citizen, nor am I being true to my own morals and ethics, my own purpose in life.

Yet I am a healer, a listener, and I can impact the lives of those around me. That’s what we can all do, to act locally, to be the change agent with those around us.

I live in a community. I want to be a humanitarian, a communitarian. I am a builder, a healer. And, that starts with me, here and now, right now.