"What we learn in time of pestilence," says Albert Camus in his famous 1947 novel The Plague is that: "there are more things to admire in [humanity] than to despise."
True enough, what gives value to the on-going global outbreak of the Covid-19 is the fact that, despite being threatened by the unforeseeable effect of this crisis, everyone is called to re-calibrate, to reset some things in life, like:
Habit
Morality
Mortality
First, Habit: an involuntary behavior or a series of actions one is accustomed to doing, is now put in careful examination. The every day routines or the monotony of life that somehow distracts man from the essentials are challenged existentially. In response to this pandemic, for instance, precautionary safety measures are met to control the spread of the virus. Mandatory quarantines are strictly implemented. Consequently, we see friends, families and loved ones held in enforced isolation. Their presence, which at times are taken for granted by old habits, is intensely missed by their absence. Being away from them help us realize that the most important things in life are not "what" we have but "who" we have.
"Once plague had shut the gates of the town," Camus adds, "they had settled down to a life of [discontinuity], debarred from the living warmth that gives forgetfulness of all."
Separation, then, keeps us away from the enslavement of poor habits and brings us back deeper to reality.
Secondly, in the outset of this pandemic, the concept of good and bad is tested. Morality is shaken. The absence of compulsion, or being "indifferent" to or toward one thing or another, is reshaped by the idea of "commonness". Everyone is susceptible. The virus knows no age, gender, race or religion. Once infected, no suffering is foreign to another body. What everyone is facing right now, therefore, is not just a matter of self-preservation alone but a "general" concern. As such, the rightness of an act is no longer pointed to different directions but to one specific goal: the good of the many. After all, in the worst calamity, when suffering becomes cumbersome, people rise above themselves to confront the inevitable. In doing so, they recognize a mutual effort: communal and collective, to reduce if not stop the spread of the virus.
The quality of goodness then is reshaped by this act of social collaboration. We see doctors and healthcare professionals, for example, carry their utmost duty with no reservations.
"An action, to have moral worth," to borrow the words of Immanuel Kant, "must be done from duty. Beneficence is a duty; and he who frequently practices it, and sees his benevolent intentions realized comes, at length, really to love him to whom he has done good. Beneficence is a duty."
Lastly, if there's one good thing that this pandemic has created, it is the awareness of our "limitedness" in life, our mortality, our own personal death.
This crucial time in our life is a reminder that nothing stands still.
Everything falters.
Everything withers.
Everything stops.
No one is exempted.
There is no escape in death and dying.
But there is more to death that we should all know. This "boundary," says Martin Heidegger, "is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins."
With death, mindfulness starts.
We are made conscious of our looming end, but we shouldn't just give in to it and surrender to the inescapble without doing something. We need to have a sense of "urgency" each day, to remind ourselves that the "now" matters most especially in times of hopelessness. Now is the time that love and care are to be heightened in immense proportion.
And that we must, in all aspects, live life to the fullest for we know nothing of what comes ahead. And by making the most of everything there is: spending more time with the ones we love and we treasure affectionately, even if it does not reduce the risk of not contracting the virus or even avoid death, we at least, though seemingly futile and irrational in the midst of scare, still choose to act and outbrave the situation.
Such defiance really is of no spot-on guarantee to make all things meaningful, but is enough to help us define our own existence.
"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely," Heidegger concludes, "I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."
Now is the time to change our perspective.
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