As we saunter into the second year of what may be another year of lockdowns, albeit, in varying degrees, I am compelled to share with you my friends, what I have learned this past year. What seemed to be a broad spectrum in our lives pre-COVID 19 suddenly became very narrow, concrete activities in our daily lives. In fact, for many of us, we lost a very vital aspect in our lives: livelihood. The loss of ability to provide for one’s family is so devastating that it leads one to think: can I make it through? Where can I find help…

Pope Francis in his encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, said it well when he pointed out that “the storm has exposed our vulnerability and uncovered those false and superfluous certainties around which we constructed our daily schedules, our projects, our habits, and priorities .” This hit me most especially because in my attempt to protect that ability to maintain a livelihood, a livelihood that also ensured the livelihood of many, I found there were activities I was engaged in that only led to false and useless ends.

Today, although certainly in a tighter bind than pre-COVID 19 financially, my life is, I believe, in better order. Of course, worries about the uncertainty of the future stare at my face every day. But this pandemic has taught me how to put these worries in context. One can sublimate these worries in human and supernatural terms. There are worries about the vulnerability of one’s health, especially now we are senior citizens. Again, as long as we are prudent in following health protocols and have a healthy attitude towards the inevitability of death, we should be able to sleep soundly at night. My Apple Watch tells me I sleep on the average 7-8 hours every night with 4-5 hours of deep sleep.

So what have I learned?

1. Family Matters: It is Our Basic Social Unit

As obvious as it seems, this was a fact that dawned on me a month after the lockdown started in 2020. In the beginning, everyone thought that the lockdown will be for 30 days. So, I took it for granted that my entire family — down to my grandsons — were with me when the government first announced the lockdown period last March 15, 2020.

However, as the days went into months, and now the months may turn out to be a year, I feel really blessed to have been locked down with my entire family. I found out it is not healthy to be alone. Man, psychologically and physiologically, needs to have that face-to-face contact that is currently being restricted by the pandemic.

This pandemic has taught us that it’s not our officemates who will ultimately determine our surviving this pandemic. It’s not our drinking buddies, and it’s not even our business partners.

This pandemic has made my resolve to protect the family as our primary social unit even more vital. While our constitution protects this basic concept, there are attempts these days to redefine what “family” means. For those surviving this pandemic, there is no other way to define what “family” means — a mother, father, children, and grandchildren.

2. Social Interaction with Friends and Colleagues Matters

Over this last year, I lost 15 friends to COVID-19. Except for one to whom I could send a taped message even when he was intubated, I was never able to visit or talk to the others. I am told of the solitude of those who die from the disease. I am informed of the pain they suffer alone without being able to feel the touch of a loved one or hear the consoling whisper from a spouse, child, or even just a friend.

This is why I feel it is essential to reach out to friends and colleagues. I have regular chats with friends, former classmates. We have no particular agenda, just sharing experiences and reminiscing our past. Of course, we do have regular “ZOOM” meetings with our business colleagues, but just being able to talk will surely help.

You and I, we are all suffering in the strictest sense of the word. Suffering because we cannot do what a normal human being, a social animal, a social being, was designed to do. Therefore, we should reach out to whoever we can. This will help our mental and physical health.

3. Physical and Mental Health Matters

We are lucky to live in a gated community that eventually allowed its residents to use the subdivision roads to walk, run, or simply exercise. Otherwise, we would have been relegated to a small gym and just our room. As the doctors recommend Vitamin D to get from the sun, a year without the sun would have been disastrous. While this may be an exaggeration, one gets the drift.

Regular exercises have kept my body active daily. It’s a daily mental struggle to go out and sweat. The Activity app of my Apple Watch helps, of course. The challenge is finding variety in the activities that I do. After running throughout the village, I often itch to go out of the subdivision and run the way I used to run — in faraway places like the UP oval!

While watching Netflix or Apple TV+ can tend to be addicting, with some self-control, this activity helps balance off my day. I tend to watch crime whodunit series– it makes my brain work, and documentaries to find out more about events and people worldwide.

I have grabbed a couple of books from my library of never-read books. I do not know, but I had this habit of buying books that I never ended up reading at all. This pandemic has forced the issue — what else is there to read except the books I never read?

4. Wine and Music Matters

Some wine and music at the end of the day have kept the doldrums out of our lives this past year. Whether it’s just Joy and me or with the kids, we find every reason to sit back and listen to a Diana Krall or some excellent soothing jazz album. It’s that time of day when she and I can either just throw out nonsense at each other, like daydreaming of traveling soon or seriously talking about our future.

We would sit in different parts of the house to mimic the “tapas crawl” we miss. While enjoying a bottle of Ribera del Duero, we would put on a Bebo and Cigala album to bring us back when we were strolling along the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca. Or maybe a bottle of Chablis or Pouilly-Fumé that can invoke those nostalgic memories. We talk of the times we would walk along the Seine to go to Robert e Louis, a traditional restaurant in 64 rue Vieille du Temple, in Paris.

For the music, I can stream from Qobuz, Tidal, Spotify, or Apple Music. As a platform, I can stream through Roon, Sonos, or Apple Homepods. So between those apps and speakers, my music choices are almost limitless.

I limit myself to classical music as background to my working time: Bach, Mozart, and Chopin are my favorites. I often leave the easy track and dabble with Rachmaninoff, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky. Then try some unknown composer to test my mental ability to focus on whatever it is I am working on.

As for jazz, I start off late in the afternoon with vocal jazz, then progress into heavier bebop as the night gets late. Often I would go for Bossa Nova. Sometimes I jump into completely unknown artists suggested only by the AI of my streaming apps.

Finally, I have gone back to my guitar playing, and I have learned to play the piano again. All these help me keep a balance during these days of the pandemic. Indeed, music and wine are the two elements of life that translate into the soul’s language. As one writer puts it, “sipping wine while listening to music can be an intense experience that fills our hearts and tickles our minds.”

5. Spiritual Health Matters

From almost the first day of the lockdown, our family started to pray the Holy Rosary every evening. One of the more painful realities of this daily routine is we literally witnessed the demise of the stalwart of the family. As the pandemic days wore on, his ability to pray with us became increasingly difficult for him until we lost him last August. However, as a family, we are grateful that he was with us in prayer until he breathed his last.

This is why during this pandemic, our spiritual life is the most essential aspect of our existence. I have realized that nothing on this earth worth anything. Our branded shoes, our expensive cars, our jewelry, all our wealth, all these mean nothing in the face of this pandemic. When COVID-19 hits you, you die, and you die alone without any strapping of your wealth.

This pandemic and lockdown have allowed us to hear Mass every day. As one writer puts it, the Holy Mass is heaven here on earth. Scott Hahn, in his book “The Lamb’s Supper,” points out the passage from Vatican II that made him realize that in the Holy Mass, we are all in heaven:

“In the earthly liturgy, we share in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle. With all the warriors of the heavenly army, we sing a hymn of glory to the Lord. (no. 1090).”

We usually go to the online Mass of the Manaoag Minor Basilica. We alternate this with the noon mass of the Manila Cathedral. In the whole year of the lockdown, we only received Holy Communion once, Ash Wednesday, and just because it was in our village chapel. I was able to go to Confession twice. This is one Sacrament the Church has not allowed to be online.

It has also given me time to do daily spiritual readings and mediation. All these have made me realize that God’s command to “love other as I love you” is a challenging task to accomplish. Given the misery surrounding us, it has compelled us to walk an extra mile in being merciful and compassionate to those around us. At the same time, this mercy and this compassion are precisely the blame that soothes our aching bodies, our tired minds, and our listless souls.

One year has passed, and while the vaccines are here, the end is still uncertain. However, these five lessons I’ve been taught by the pandemic are lessons I will pass on to my 3 grandsons: Emilio, Andres, and Alfonso. In passing on these nuggets of wisdom to the young, I remember again what Pope Francis said in his Encyclical Fratelli Tutti:

“If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he himself holds out, doesn’t it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them? He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans. That is how various ideologies operate: they destroy (or deconstruct) all differences so that they can reign unopposed. To do so, however, they need young people who have no use for history, who spurn the spiritual and human riches inherited from past generations, and are ignorant of everything that came before them.”

God bless us all.