When I was little and heard this concept — "natural selection" — from older people, it seemed very harsh. Even inappropriate and cruel.
Natural selection is most often encountered in birds. They let their chicks die if they don't "fight" for the food brought by the mother bird. Mammals have a bit more emotion, not pure instinct, so for them natural selection is rarer. In humans, it is entirely absent. In fact, within a family, the weaker one usually enjoys more protection and support than the stronger, autonomous one.
Still, natural selection also happens among humans… This time, the source is the pandemic itself. It's important to stress that I don't refer here to surviving or not surviving the illness, to getting vaccinated or not, to protecting oneself from the virus or not. I refer to that selection between those who come out mentally whole and those who don't — those who remain somewhat emotionally balanced and those destabilized by what's happening around them.
For a few weeks now, I've been starting to see "the first alarming signs." We are perhaps halfway through the pandemic, after a somewhat normal summer, facing another cold season that looks difficult, and this begins to be felt… It's felt in people's attitude, in patience, in decisions, in life. Fear is a great enemy of inner balance.
Loneliness and isolation, likewise. At home, there are many single people, without family, who got their socializing from meetings with friends, from going out in the city. Today, only the phone and TV remain.
How do we still endure?
I know no other solution besides faith! A "somewhat atheist" friend once told me I have "magical thinking" when I relate this way to life and balance. He made me think — but no more than 10 minutes — that maybe he's right… In any case, today I am convinced it's the only chance!
To choose to believe otherwise means to opt for a hard path, at the end of which you might end up shattered.
Faith is a sensitive, intimate subject about which it's said you shouldn't speak except with very close people. Yet today, I think it's important to encourage each other in faith. Not understood as bigotry, Orthodoxy, services and priests — but that intimate, deep faith whose source is nothing but love… for life, for oneself, for those near us, and for people in general. I refer to that faith which compels us to be responsible for the gift we received — namely, life, with everything it means!
