LOVE

It is healthy, I suppose, but deeply painful, to be confronted with this irreducible truth: that everything we normally rely on to define our lives and offer us what sense of security we enjoy turns out to be nothing more than illusion. The ground we thought we could stand on forever can be snatched out from under our feet in a moment. Source of income, financial security, social stability, material well-being, relationships--everything that constitutes what we think of as the foundation of our lives is exposed at moments such as these to be radically unstable.

All the more reason, then, to keep looking within, to be working as best we can to build the inner strength and resilience we need to withstand what Hamlet so memorably described as "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Outrageous indeed, the onslaught of this global pandemic that threatens not only human lives but everything we have constructed to sustain them. We are left to contemplate the radical insecurity of our tenuous existence, and offer to each other the only solace we know to calm the fear and heal the pain in our hearts: the power of selfless love.