In what feels like a new holiday tradition, we here in South Africa entered a new wave of COVID infections as we headed into December. And so we’re hunkered down, again, to ride it out during the festive season.

Don’t feel too bad for me, though - some of my options for isolation are really special. I spent a chunk of that fourth wave completing my second vipassana course, a Buddhist meditation practice that gives new meaning to that Desiderata opening: Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. For ten days, I took a vow of silence and forsook the outside world and its distractions (no devices of any kind, no books, no writing, no exercise routines).

I have to say, in 2020 (my first time around) I started the course with some trepidation, but this year I was ready to be quiet, to go inward and forget all about the world for a while.

The concept of vipassana is grounded in the law of impermanence: because everything is constantly in flux, there is no point getting attached to, or avoiding, anything. To either cling or resist will just result in suffering.

The practice itself is deceptively simple: be aware of reality and accept it, exactly as it is - not as you want it to be - with equanimity, knowing that whatever reality is right now, it will not always be so. You do this by observing sensations arising in your own body. Whether it’s pain in your knees (and back, and hips, and neck) as you sit for your tenth hour of seated meditation that day, or boredom with your own endless thought loops, or elation at what seems like a breakthrough insight - it is impermanent. See it clearly, non-judgmentally, and accept it for what it is now.

(If any of this sounds easy, I’m not explaining it properly.)

But truly, what better lesson to re-learn right now, when it feels like nothing is changing - or even that we are regressing - in the pandemic.

Because - actually - it is changing, it has changed, it will change.

The latest variant is more transmissible, yes, but also weaker, than its predecessors. Hopefully, this signals that we are entering a new stage, a period in which we’ll likely have many new, but progressively weaker, variants.

It’s important to continue to see clearly how this pandemic has changed us, too. And how that change is also a chance - how our undoing is also our opportunity. In the words of Zenju Earthlyn Manuel:

“We are to be undone. This is life. There’s no getting around it. We unravel over and over again. Life gets disrupted. We are thrown off. We face the unimaginable. It’s sobering, ending up in a place that we thought we’d never be. We’re not who we thought we were.

We live in societies that reinvent themselves after each destruction. Often, we use the same old bricks to rebuild. It’s a shortcut to quiet fear. We don’t have enough time to start from scratch. We won’t demolish constitutions, legislations, preambles of human rights that have long outlived their functionality. We simply attach legs to them—so many legs, that whatever it once was now exists as an unrecognizable monster and no one can find the body, the core, the breath, or the intention for peace. 

What is being said about centuries of violence? What’s being asked of us in the midst of injustice? Can a catastrophic experience lead to a large-scale awakening?

To be undone is to be reminded that in nothingness, there is peace. A peace-filled nothingness isn’t an annihilation of anything or anyone. It’s a nothingness that feels like a blanket of snow that covers, for a time, what you have taken for granted and rarely appreciate. The beauty of peaceful nothingness is that everything lies beneath it.”

I can’t think of a better thought with which to enter these last days of 2021. A hard year, a year full of hard lessons. A year of constant change, constant flux and (sometimes) flow.

I do feel undone. Calmly and quietly undone. I hope I don’t rush to restart or reinvent too quickly.

I hope you can find some quiet and stillness in the noise and haste.

“Remember what peace there may be in silence.”