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Dr. Robert Waldinger offers five ways to keep our connection alive in this time of separation.
Picture the Buddha teaching on Zoom. He meets individually with disciples in breakout rooms, and people unmute themselves to ask him questions. This is unfathomable, of course. Even someone who possessed the Buddha’s radical creativity and imagination would have been hard-pressed to envision this scenario in which we now find ourselves: trying to hold on to a community online.
The shift to online has come with such lightning speed that, less than a year ago, few of us would have been able to envision it either. Yet here we are. And we encounter this new abnormal—what has rapidly become the way things are—as we encounter everything in our lives: through our own personal lenses.
The age-old wisdom that community is a treasure does not change in a world of social distancing.
Members of my meditation group express reactions to online practice that run the gamut from joy to misery to withdrawal:
“I can’t meditate.”
“This online retreat feels so nourishing.”
“I feel so connected to people on video.”
“I feel so alone.”
In addition to teaching Zen, I direct a study of adult life that has been going on for eighty-three years and continues to this day. Starting in the 1930s and following the same people from the time they were teenagers into old age, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked hundreds of lives through the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, and 9/11.
None of these people experienced a pandemic, but they lived through the kinds of social and personal upheavals that fueled the Buddha’s enlightenment 2,600 years ago, and that we are experiencing today. The world continues to burn, and change is the only constant.