Covid-19 and contingency

Lockdown is a little weird and unsettling for most of us, unless, of course, you are already a hermit.  One article I read recently spoke of a collective sense of grief for our former lives lost, yet many have also pointed to some positive social consequences of Covid-life. I even found myself (self-consciously) doing hopscotch in response to some playful street art on my daily walk recently... Though we have largely lost touch with the word, a greater sense of the contingency of life is something we may have also been feeling, without knowing it, these days. What I mean is a greater awareness that life is fragile and that, ultimately, we have limited control over our own existence. This can be a scary realization yet it also tends to stir within us a renewed interest in those questions that relate to this precarious condition, that is, thoughts about the deeper purpose and meaning of the lives we are living. Blaise Pascal famously said that "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone", meaning, perhaps, that the busy-ness and distractions of normal life, largely prevents us from thinking carefully about these 'first things'. Social media may still distract us from achieving the improved philosophic state that Pascal envisaged, yet, for all of the real horror of this time, there have also arisen new opportunities to settle and ponder on the unchanging questions of life, which may, in time, also lead to greater clarity about who we are, where we're going and what is really of value to us.