Since the coronavirus crisis increased and rapidly evolved, I have this constant feeling of a chapter never written before. A chapter where nobody can tell you „All will be fine by the end of…" because no one honestly knows.
This could be indeed a good moment to strip ourselves from all the status obsession and unhealthy perfectionism or unhealthy comparisons we are usually affected from. We are basically all united by one challenge now, which is fighting a tremendous infection, and not only, we are confined to use all the same tools. Zoom is clearly becoming a thing. I thought it already was, but literally everybody is now using it, amongst other digital tools.
This makes me think of those unattainable worlds that usually seem so far away from us. Like people who are celebrities, or those CEOs who are always busy and never have time to speak.
These people usually seem like from a distant world and invincible. Me, I am working from home as well as Bill Gates is doing right now, or any other human being who wants to stay safe. We are all probably facing the same absolutely BASIC questions or realizations:
Ok, now shall I work from y pajamas or not? Or just wear something waist up if I have an online call or meeting
I have to tell my husband/wife/children not to make so much noise right now since I will have an online workshop. What if they need to use the bathroom and slam the door?
What if the camera is not working? How do I mute the participants?
What will happen to my work? What about my clients?
Things like these indeed strip us of our perfectionism and make us way more human, simpler, back to basics. It gives us a perspective, an outlook of who we are and our limiting beliefs when we think we are the only ones going through crisis, insecurities, challenges and personal dramas.
I ask myself what the world truly wants to tell us. I understand that it might want to tell us that we are being inconsiderate, selfish, that we are going too fast, and having too much stress and disrespecting the planet. But then again, as every turning point of our history, the inevitable unanswered question: why then innocent people die? I know there is no real answer for that, except the logical one and medical ones, saying that people with pre-existing conditions and older ones are more vulnerable.
In the absence of answers to such existential questions, I would like to point out what the learning points could be:
We are all equal in the face of such pandemic, anyone can be affected
Status, at this stage of things, does not matter!!! For me, it did not even matter before, but now even less, because such a situation gives us a huge perspective shift.
All organizations should promote working from home, even after the pandemic. It is important to let people be flexible
Our home should be not just a hotel where we pass by. We can cultivate a relationship with it (like now) and appreciate our roof even more
Self-care and learning: we can learn to do new things. To cook if we were not cooking before; to play the piano (if we have a piano at home we say we never use). We can read, practice sports, we can create. We can write, we can imagine. We can meditate, daydream or take that final action we never managed to do.
There is an inevitable return to the authentic, to the essential. And let's be frank: it was about time. The stress of wanting, wanting and doing, doing, the overload of information, were already at their peak.
The return to calling
Nobody is ever calling since we all started using WhatsApp. And now, the amount of video call that we are all doing per day, to help each other, is massive. Let's face it: we are re-discovering a life outside individualism too. If there was an excess of lack of self-care, there was also an excess of thinking for oneself. Wish we decrease in both excesses and think how this experience has forced us to be more aware of our behaviors.