An Awakening to Be Conscious to the Mystery in the Everyday Incidents

An Awakening: To Be Aware to the Mystery of Life

I think about the gaping hole that the effects of Covid have unmasked in the world. I think about the collective human body being tragically affected, and how the calamity of death has been unwavering.

In more recent times, especially during the onslaught of Covid and its many variants, the wreckage of death by suicide has compounded the toll of lives lost. When Regina King’s son’s death by suicide was announced, there was a chilling awareness that so many are experiencing an invisible, incalculable, desperate need to implode — and believe the only way out is to self-explode.

It happened more intimately too, with family and loved ones. Another headline told of a beautiful young woman — a celebrity figure, refined, educated, articulate, admired — found dead after leaping from her ninth-floor New York apartment. Closer to home, a Maryland Councilman also succumbed to suicide. We are left with the anguish and the horror of how to reconcile with the tragedy of death by suicide.

There is a gaping hole left behind. Not only the physical absence of a loved one, but the human void that has been exacerbated during this time of Covid. We have been drowned in our masks of self-protection, fear, isolation, and insular routines. The human construct is being shattered into pieces.

The core of social engagement has become strained and drained of life-sustaining energy. Many present as though they are “ok,” while combusting internally. Everyday interactions with friends, family, and colleagues have become virtual rather than physical. Behind masks, behind screens, behind protective apparatus, there are eyes brimming with tears, sorrow, hurt, pain, and suffering. A mask cannot cure the dying within.

I remember reading a social media response that said sending thoughts and prayers to the grieving, or offering condolences, was intrusive. I disagree. In human care, outreach, support, and sharing, we fill pieces of that gaping hole left open. As humans, we need an outpouring of love and kindness to help fill each other’s emptiness.

I do not have the answers to the gravity of extremes that may lead a soul to leave this earth by their own hands. Internal desolation cannot be fully explained by any prognosis. But I know this: an alarm has sounded for those of us in the land of the living, calling us to awaken.

There are moments when life itself shakes you awake. Not through crisis or calamity, but through the quiet insistence of awareness. To be alive is to be aware. To awaken is to begin seeing the threads between mystery and reality, between what is visible and what is hidden.

Perhaps we are not behind masks only to protect ourselves from a pandemic. Perhaps we wear masks — physical and emotional — to hide from the deeper need to connect. If only we could look beyond the coverings we wear and demonstrate the human instinct to render love, care, and compassion. To pour resilience, and possibly hope, into the invisible dying right before our very eyes.

This awakening is not an end, but a beginning — a way of living that honors mystery while staying fully present in the now.

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Update (2025):
Rereading this today, in light of the noise and spectacle that floods our public life, I see these words differently. Awareness is harder, but even more necessary. For my current reflection, read: An Awakening, Again: To Be Aware in a Time of Spectacle.