Lockdown day 13: Maybe something good will come from this?

A few days ago, at 07:00, I stood on the balcony of my house and looked out over the Cape Town CBD. Usually at this time of day, the air would be filled with the noise of thousands of cars, buses and taxis congesting the roads, hurriedly taking people to work or children to school. I am so used to this "white noise" that I do not hear it any more.

However, for the last two weeks I have woken up every morning with an awareness that something was different: It was silent outside.

On that morning, I listened with amazement at how quiet the city was. From my balcony, all I could hear was the sounds of birds chirping and a few frogs croaking. 

With the sun rising, I closed my eyes and thought about what was going on in the world - about the fact that with every dawn that breaks tens of thousands more people would be infected and thousands more would have died. In my mind's eye I scanned the globe: The US, Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa, South America. No place has been spared.

It filled me with a deep sense of sadness, but at the same time I realised that I had never before felt so connected to the rest of the globe as I did at that moment. I had a deep awareness that everyone in the world was facing the same threat, the same uncertainty and above all the same sense of vulnerability. A vulnerability caused by something so small that we cannot see it.  

Yet this microscopic virus has brought not only a village or a country or even a continent, but the WHOLE world to a standstill within two months. All our intellectual power, knowledge, technology, intelligence and military weapons could not prevent this from happening. Now, none of the things that we value so much - fame, money and power - can secure anyone's safety anymore. 

With the world literally stopped in its tracks, the only way we can do something to stay safe is to do nothing. Most of us find this difficult, but this deadly virus is forcing all of us to take a breath and to slow down.