The world is in a panic; everything is closed; grocery shelves sit empty from the ravages of a frightened people. Each day’s news only to ratchets up the anxiety inhabiting so many. It seems we have entered a unique moment in world history; or have we?
“There is nothing new under the sun,” writes Solomon. Our situation is not as novel as we tend to believe. We’ve been here before and survived. In times of crisis–whether personal or otherwise–the words of the past offer us the perspective we need. They too faced down the troubles of this life and stand ready to offer us helping hand.
In 1948, C. S. Lewis penned an essay that is making its way around the internet in light of current events. Lewis’ words stand ready to help us see beyond the circumstances feeding our fears. Lewis’ insight is too good and needed not to share below:
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.’
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
Those three paragraphs contain great help for us in facing what stands before us. While not directly referential to Coronavirus, they address our situation with clarity, and truth; they remind us of things we know, but forget when panic sets in:
(1) Live as you have always lived,
(2) Our situation is not novel,
(3) Be about sensible and human things;
(4) Reject fear