The Dharma in Difficult Times: Finding Your Calling in Times of Loss, Change, Struggle, and Doubt by Stephen Cope

Author:Stephen Cope [Cope, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House Inc.
Published: 2021-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

17

During the early days of the pandemic, I had a number of late-night calls from a friend of mine back in my home state of Ohio, concerning this very question of duty.

Toby Williams is a thirty-five-year-old nurse from a small town in Ohio—a suburb of Akron, Ohio, just a few miles from the town where I myself grew up. Toby is a gay African American man who had attended a number of my seminars at Kripalu over the previous five years. We had become good friends. We had bonded over all things Ohio, over our love of yoga, our dogs, and over being gay.

Toby called me several nights in a row from his home. He was wrestling with his conscience.

The COVID-19 pandemic had struck New York City particularly hard, and by early April of 2020, the New York City hospital system was overwhelmed. The evening news was full of stories of overflowing wards, refrigerated trucks full of bodies, lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), and a shortage of ventilators. The air was full of a new vocabulary: pandemic, PPE, quarantine, social distancing. President Donald Trump declared war on the pandemic (though his “war” was always too little, too late) and announced that he was now, egad, a “wartime president.” Within weeks, the world was turned on its head.

On the phone, Toby sounded conflicted: “Steve, I feel that I simply have to go to New York and help. But I’m not sure it’s my calling. What about Josh [his thirteen-year-old son]? Isn’t he my first duty? I just don’t fuckin’ know what to do, man.” This was an Arjuna moment. Conflicting sacred duties confounded Toby’s mind, just as they had confounded Arjuna’s on the night before the battle of Kurukshetra.

Toby was small of stature, lean and athletic, with a shock of hair arranged in some wonderfully funky new style. Toby was irreverent, fun, with a wicked sense of humor. He was, like me, a longtime yoga practitioner. At the time of the pandemic, he’d been divorced from his wife for seven years, and shared custody of his thirteen-year-old son with his ex-wife. I knew from my many workshops with Toby that he thought deeply about things.

The Ohio hospital in which Toby had worked for a decade had specialized in elective surgeries, and these were no longer being scheduled in the short term, so Toby was furloughed. The pandemic had not yet really hit Akron. Toby was sheltering at home with his boyfriend, Justin, his son, Josh, and their two dogs.

“I feel like it’s my duty to go, man,” said Toby.

“Tell me what you mean by that, Toby,” I said.

“Okay, here’s the thing: I’m trained in that very thing, in working with difficult patients. I know how to do it. I can do it. I prayed about it with my pastor. Weighed all the different factors. I just feel I gotta do it. I mean, I just do not feel right sitting on my ass here at home.”

More of his story spilled out.

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