We are living through strange times. Hopefully, if you read this a few years from now, you won’t remember these days, but for our present selves, still going through the Coronavirus Pandemic, all we have been living is new, dazzling and frightening. It has been hard for me to write, and although my writer’s block has probably settled in a couple of months ago, among a series of transformations going on this year, the Pandemic we’re all going through clouds everything else.
I count myself among the fortunate. In my profession it is at least possible to work remotely, and I can currently continue working. Many have been laid off or outright made redundant, and my thoughts go to them hoping they can quickly go back to their lives.
Of course, there were adjustments in my life as well. Working from home can be fun and relaxing, if you are the master of your own time. But add a small child to the mix and the border between work and childcare becomes so porous that you begin to reconsider alternatives.
I immediately missed some things I was used to. Exercising, walking out in the sun, being able to simply go shopping. But the news showed something increasing more serious every day, and these small inconveniences turned out to be simply irrelevant. Numbers that at the beginning seemed horrendous for China and Iran, have been dwarfed by Italy and Spain, and more recently the US.
Set against this backdrop, what could there be of importance to add to this blog?
A global crisis
And yet, life must go on. I like to chronicle my progress as a professional developer in this blog, and compare it to an adventurer in search for enlightenment or self-development. And I thought I could perhaps write a comment on these times relating to the adventure framework, and maybe what lessons we could take from there.
There is a big difference, though, to the viewpoint I’ve used this far. The Adventure as I have seen it til now was more an individual progress, a journey of self-development for me or any other professional in a similar situation. But this is not an individual crisis, it is a global one. And the adventure perspective is brought out from the individual to the society.
When we look under that light, I think we have collectively panicked. It is easy to float between two extremes. On the one hand, the apparent fatality rate of 1% can encourage some hubristic belief that the disease is not serious and will not affect us. On the other hand, humans have a notoriously hard time to understand exponential growth, and it’s very hard for us to fathom the impact of anything that grows that fast, or all the implications in a complex system like a society.
And because we have no previous experience, we forget that there is more to this than the direct loss of life due to the virus. We have to consider as well the damage caused by the loss due to overwhelmed hospitals, and the economic impact of simultaneous loss of demand and supply.
Governments have taken extreme measures that were unthinkable only a couple of months ago, and still we have mostly accepted them. As a society, we are in the Ordeal of the Hero’s Journey.
I am not going to make predictions nor give solutions. I’m no more an expert than anyone you can find down at the pub. I want only to make this point.
A gift of time
These are unique times, when we have been granted a pause that seldom appers in tales. In the Middle Ages, at least in Western Europe, military activity tended to stop in Winter. For the Knight and Soldier, Winter was a time to stay in, tend to the farms, gather resources for the cold, and later stay in healing, eating and story-telling and learning. This was a period of reflection and retreat that, in modern times, we have lost the right to.
It is similar to a figurative death: staying indoors a parallel to “going-under”, and the frozen earth an image of inactivity. But with the arrival of Spring, activity restarts and plants begin to sprout and blossom. From immemorial times, this has been compared to the rebirth of Earth itself.
These times of lockdown are a unique period for us, and may be a unique opportunity to self-examine.
We’re living through a suspension of time, when all we knew about our life in society has changed. Cities are vacant and expectant, despoiled of their earlier vibrancy, weeping for the people that have abandoned them. But in these apocalyptic scenarios, of cold stone, and roads again pristine, there is also beauty. A beauty of peace, quiet, and a second opportunity.
If you don’t have vulnerable relatives caring for their health, or personal safety, then you may change your perspective to reduce the anxiety of staying in.
This is a one-of-a-kind crisis, when we’re asked simply to stay at home. And if you don’t have to work, at least you’ll have the gift of extra time. Time to make experiments in your daily routine and rethink what you want to do about your life when the future returns it to us.
This time is, after all, an interval in our lives, a Valley we are going through. We will be changed when we reach the other side. The whole world may be changed. And this can be the source of the greatest transformation of our lives. As we go through the Easter Season, the stark imagery of death and ressurrection that this period evokes is particularly appropriate.
What will you do with it?
We’ve been taken from the streets and given back to our closest families. Metaphorically, we’ve gone back to the womb to be born again.
I feel like we’ve all been removed from whichever play or game we were set in as characters, and left to wonder what is the purpose of our lives while the gamemasters of the matrix change the operating system. We have, radically and mercilessly, been forced into a reset period, when all the rules are changed and we can, in a way we never could before and probably never will again, stop to think about who we live our life, and what we may want to change.
Now is the time to ask those questions we sometimes push forward in our lives, with the hindsight of actual experience:
- What is there in my life that I only missed now that I can’t have it?
- How important is what I normally do?
- Is it really worth to work far from home, in long commutes, or stay local and enjoy more family-time?
- What do I value in an office-based work environment, that I can’t improve by working at home?
I have found several unexpected good things during this time. The best of all was the newly found time with my family, and more hours of rest and sleep. And the absence of a commute keeps me more relaxed.
Strangely, I do not miss London. Barely only 3 weeks have gone by, and already it seems so distant, removed to another planet, or buried in a dream as if it never existed. In my mind, London is another space, waiting expectantly for me and millions others to flock to it again, to rush everyday along its dirty streets to an office, and regurgitate us all in the evening.
But I don’t know. Maybe I and many others will transform the way we work, escape that rat race, and apply the lessons and discoveries we make through this pandemic.
If you do have the time, use it well. In all likelihood, you will never have such a reset period again. Examine your life, see what you could improve, test it if you can. And when all this is over, and we are all reborn to the world, apply those changes.
Maybe you’ll live more locally; find a job you can do remotely; do more exercise in the middle of the day; or maybe even move to a cheaper and sunnier country. It all depends on your circumstances, of course, and only you know what you value. But don’t waste this time. You’ll never have it again.