Resilience and Meaning-Making Amid the COVID-19 Epidemic in China

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful border experience awakening us to our existential predicament. Such a predicament includes transience and impermanence, unpredictability, emptiness (existential vacuum), and the interdependence of life and death. The anxiety aroused by the pandemic can awaken us to an ontological mode of existence in which we are authentic, aware, responsible, and transcendent. The Chinese idiom reminds us that crises contain both danger and opportunity. Thus, this article explores how out of this awareness can emerge resilience, creativity, and meaning-making in the midst of confinement, isolation, and suffering.