News emerged earlier this month that the deers of Nara Park are facing an unprecedented food shortage due to the diminution of tourists in Japan arising from the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. The animals have resorted to searching for food and foraging on the small traffic islands and mall-links in Nara city, away from their natural base where the Eight Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara, listed in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites since Dec 1998, are located.

It was almost a year to the day, in March 2019 (and prior to that 10 years earlier) that I visited and toured Nara, this time exploring not just the lovely city and its park, but also its less developed Prefecture to the south, traversing the rural back-roads than to encounter the more refined attractions around Kyoto to the north.

Finding an affinity with off-season traveling had been a huge boon to our travels – no crowds, low fares, better inns, but this is often balanced by the less stellar scenery as the off-season displays not the blossoms but the buds, and the snow-melts, not the golden leaves of autumn, but the barren and fallen.

Here in these pristine surroundings, we marveled at nature without recognizing it’s great confluence with humans and other interactions, and the yet to be encountered subtle shocks that will displace a delicate balance with a survival crisis a year hence.

In an earlier post, I summarized the polymath Jared Diamond’s profound lecture at the Rockefeller Institute, NYC, on March 27, 2003, “Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions” . It was profound because of the simplicity of its relevance, the difficulty of execution, and the multitude of anthropological examples of societies that survived and those that didn’t.

But back to the deers of Nara. In this inter-dependent world that we live in, the effect and impact of human kindness and our interactions with creatures and fellow human beings alike, will determine how we think and feel about ourselves and each other when this epidemic is over. Have we behaved like God’s children, and promoted Love, instead of Holocausts and Sacrifices (Hosea 6:6), or have we become selfish, jaded, cynical and unkind?

What is in the nature of Man that he should live in hope and not despair, to be fulfilled in the giving and not just the receiving? These are complex thoughts that come to bear and we can only marvel at our finest hours in the retrospect. Reading Viktor Frankl’s Man Searching for Meaning, then to acknowledge his complex life history, and to later read the atheistic declarations of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project, as an outcome of the latter’s own journey through the darkness of the Holocaust, we are yet again reminded that the great tragedies of this world will still lead to a dichotomy of beliefs and life compasses, carrying with them great accomplishments and insights. Out of the ashes will arise seeds and roots of new beginnings. We just have to be more forgiving of self and others, and be mindful of our natural inclinations to be judgmental and selfish. This, too shall pass, in the age of the epidemic.

Nara, 2019 March, Lumix G85