I saw a Facebook post this morning where someone said that 79,884 people had recovered from the Coronavirus. How refreshing it was to see that someone is focusing on the good in this situation, rather than continually being spoon fed bad news by the media. The death toll worldwide is reaching 20,000, but that is not even close to 1% of the world’s population. Nature is continually sending us floods, tornados, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes; and yet the human population continues to rise. Simultaneously, other species are disappearing from the planet every day due to habitat loss, poaching, and outright eradication. We may lose 1 % of our own species, but many species still hang on the precipice, having lost 90% or more of their own kind.
Are you helplessly hungering for more bad news to defend your fears, or are you seeking to look for the silver lining behind this cloud that has settled over our human population? The truth is that most of us have merely been inconvenienced and very few of us have actually and truly suffered. There has been suffering all around us of other species, because of us. There has been suffering of our own kind while many have chosen not to see. The wealthy sit in their cushy modern office buildings and their million dollar mansions eating the finest food and living luxurious lives; turning a blind eye to the homeless and the hungry, and to the hopeless despair of so many thousands. Many lives were lost during the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Millions of people have suffered and died through genocide, hatred, and war. Many animals and birds have suffered slow deaths in traps and from lead poisoning and electrocution because of our human encroachment. A lot of lives will be lost before this is all said and done, but let’s not lose sight of those others who are suffering in equally devastating ways. We cannot bemoan those that have passed. We must look ahead and ask what we can do to alleviate suffering of all kinds in the living – for all sentient beings. You can be sure that life will go on and when this current challenge is finally behind us, will we look for the next thing to go wrong or will we make an effort to stop the suffering in the world? We can choose to look for the good. We can choose to add to the lightness and not the darkness.
