This is not the end.

…nor the beginning of the end... this is only the end of the beginning. — Winston Churchill.

My friend of many years said this to me today. I was enquiring on his health, as he is a medical doctor and has seen a lot of strain over the past couple of months since the pandemic broke out.

I keep reminding myself to check on my friends, and my family alike. Just the other week I let my guard slip and I didnt check in on another friend of many years, and I woke up one morning to a message alerting me that she is now dearly departed.

I was shattered.

Yet, the joy as we may have now, from the relaxation of the regulations that had kept us apart, gives us a new lease on life. And a chance to reconnect, perhaps with more purpose into our relationships.

And we get to do some of the things that we longed for, that we may have thought of ourselves as being imprisoned from. But we are warned to thread with caution, by those that have seen greater calamity in the hospitals than we may have.

And so that quote from Winston Churchill advises us to be more careful as we mingle into our old comforts, and in our reunions with some old companions. Because the contagion may yet reappear, and we may have yet another greater mess of loss, than the one we have seen.

I hope the euphoria of the reopening of bottle stores will soon subside.

I read somewhere that the Spanish Flu of 1918 popped up in three successive waves. And each time the world fell back into seclusion and quarantine, and tremendous loss of lives. But I would like to think we are better informed and better educated to contain this plague.

And I pray that it ends sooner than it begins yet again.

But I also think that perhaps the planet does this to itself, perhaps a way to reset and achieve a balance and recreate some kind of equilibrium. I mean, nature has been thriving. Animals have reemerged into areas where they were last seen long ago. Some species are being observed in places that they were not thought to exist in or may have abandoned.

And so it could be that this pandemic marks the beginning of a new existential paradigm, and even when we say there will be a new normal, we dont quite yet understand what that looks like.

Our old habits may die away, and new habits emerge. I no longer find spectator sports that interesting. I havent watched a full game of football since news broke out of football players and managers catching Covid. I cringe when I see players on the pitch hugging and hi-fiving in celebration. Perhaps Im extra paranoid now?

And maybe a new age of consciousness is upon us, to care for nature, for our communities and to care for all of our humanity. And we then achieve more cohesive survival, with better insight into how we are all connected, and how a sneeze in China got all of the world sick.

We are one, you know?

One humanity.