Many people are experiencing fear and anxiety due to the current Covid-19 pandemic situation. As everyone is practicing social distancing and their normal lifestyle has changed dramatically, we’ve also found that our economic situation is also being negatively affected. People wonder and worry about things like how long this difficult time will last. At the risk of sounding a bit extreme, many people say that what we are experiencing feels like a war. In my experience with living in this current situation, I suddenly remembered a movie that I had watched before called Life is Beautiful.
The film takes place during World War II and is a narrative of the touching story of Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni), who is able to maintain his cheerful and pleasant demeanor even during the most difficult of times. The story starts out as a pleasant comedy with Guido falling in love with a school teacher named Dora and they soon get married. From that point in the movie, it follows the happenings after Guido’s family is sent to a Nazi concentration camp.
Many people will be touched in the scenes where Guido finds clever ways to hide the dire situation from his son, Giosué Orefice, keeping him from knowing about the war and the dire situation that they are in. Guido reassures his son by being a joyful and pleasant father even before he is dragged off to be executed. This particular scene is highly emotional and considered as the best scene of the movie.
Currently, we may all be experiencing psychological stress and anxiety from the Covid-19 pandemic through our personal economic difficulties and other struggles. It may even feel like a wartime situation. Since no one really knows how long this situation will last, it is sometimes hard to be joyful. In this situation, there may be no man like Guido who can always smile and entertain his family and people during this perceived pandemic “war.”
In this world, everybody has different minds. There is no single person who has the same mind as any other person. Everyone lives in a different world. Our body is like a camera, so it sees the world and copies it exactly. We take pictures as we see the world and we save them in our minds and live within them. As people live in their own mind world, no one lives in the True world. For that reason, people feel stressed or depressed. What is happening in real world is nothing like my mind’s world. Everyone knows that the world doesn’t always go my way. As the spread of COVID-19 is not what people want it to be, we should try not to get stuck in their mind world – which is fake – but instead we should get rid of it and become one with the real world’s mind. Once we live accordingly in real world’s mind, there are no problems and no worries.
Even though it is just a film, Guido can be joyful because he ignores his mind world. He sometimes feels desperate and fearful during wartime like many other people, but he lets go of those minds and fits himself into the real situation. Yet, as the fearful and hopeless wartime situation continued, he did not fall back into the fake self. By living according to what the world actually is, he has no pain and lives with only joy and happiness.
Everyone might be in a difficult situation right now. Continuing daily life as it used to be is impossible and the economy is getting worse. Everyone is afraid of how long this situation will last. In this current situation, we can overcome our worry better through meditation – which is getting rid of the fear and panic in ourselves and living according to the real world. Again, the real world does not work as I want. The world is real, not my mind world. My mind does not exist in the real world. That fake world is driving me into agony, but the True world is working simply as it is.
Let’s stop being deceived by our minds and get rid of those fake thoughts and the world I created and be a person who can live in the real world as it is. Then all stress and agony will vanish forever and we can live joyfully in the real Heaven with the real World’s mind as a real person.