THE JOY OF ALL THINGS
Saturday, Mar. 21, 2020
What now?
What’s next?
Re-start anything, or everything, we do?
The world is full of people just like you and me, our feet metaphorically knocked out from under us – wondering whether we’ll get our legs under us again. Aside from obvious health concerns, we know this landscape of life, business, and careers will be substantively different when the COVID-19 smoke clears.
For many of us, we’ll resume our lives, lick our wounds, and continue on in pursuit of wages, profits, advancement, and accomplishment doing JUST WHAT WE WERE DOING before all this trouble started.
Hold on now …
Does this mean I can make my life completely different, do different things, and abandon some old things?
Does this mean I can transform my life into something else if I want to?
Is this a jumping-off point, or a launching pad?
It could be.
So could have any day in any year …
True, but I’m talking about right now, right here.
I’m not saying I will, or than anyone else should, but let’s discuss that before dismissing that.
If there was ever a time where we might think the universe is speaking to us, sending us a message, then it must be just such a gift wrapped in recent events.
Sudden-death is no longer just a sports term.
Expectations have been dashed, to say nothing of retirement-plans and retirement life … and I don’t just mean in northern Italy.
Everyone is giving their head a shake; everyone is feeling a bit wobbly and unsteady in terms of their expectations of the future beyond today, so many of us are answering the same very complicated, yet straightforward short question:
What now?
Whatever we choose.
And we should realize, that is a choice moment. What better time to ask and answer questions like that than right now?
As I ponder the wisdom of careful thought v. mind-numbing self-hypnosis/rote routine, I realize that neither, and both, are called for.
There is a big box of facts – the unknown facts box.
Nobody knows.
Experts guess, but right now I am far less concerned about the percentage efficacy of those talking-heads who are making so much noise, than I am about the faceless, nameless researchers in a lab somewhere; he or she will be the 21st century’s Jonas Salk, or Christopher Columbus – someone who will sail off the edge of the earth metaphorically, bravely plunging over the edge into an uncharted waterfall of data to come up with a solution/serum/treatment.
This is not mass-hysteria, it’s about collective fears driving hopefulness for a vaccine which might work. Fingers crossed.
Trials and errors.
In the end, we won’t likely have a magic cure for COVID-19 as much as we’ll have an antidote for fear.
A few months ago, the world seemed a safer and more prosperous place than it has ever been.
And now it is not.
Our perceptions of safety have changed, and on-paper wealth has been sideswiped, values are being questioned in everyone’s mind, in every life.
And in every death.
We will emerge, probably not soon, but we will collectively move into a new era.
History will record this time in history as a hinge-point, or maybe a fork in the road or split in the paths, about this place in timer where we turn a corner; there will be life before COVID-19, and life after COVID-19.
History will recognize its significance; generations from now, it may not be paid much heed – still scholars will record this time as the first time in history, in peace-time, when such a large a percentage of the population worried about one thing every day, almost obsessively, even though the real work for change was being done by some science wunderkind in a white lab coat somewhere.
Our rational brains know COVID-19 won’t be solved by one person. A team effort or collaborators will win the Nobel Prize for this, that team will be written about – business schools will write it up as a case study for their MBA program. It will be talked about and celebrated on late-night talk shows until some other big story bumps the new magic serum from the front page …
Worry is not work.
It never was.
There is an empty box of ‘what will happen.’ We cannot guess what it will hold, we have to wait and see.
I don’t recall ever reading that a great discovery was produced by worrying about it.
I don’t recall ever reading that a breakthrough in math, physics, medicine, or computing science occurred on a comedy club stage, because laughter isn’t work either.
We all need to work.
We all need to laugh.
This situation has us stalled in our lives – like a deer mesmerized by headlights, but we must all get past this, get through this. We do it collectively, but not because we are collected or cooperating – it’s just that we are experiencing it at the same time as everyone else, a prime example of real-time learning and yearning. Imagine life, just for a moment, without all the connection, wouldn’t we all be experiencing the same feelings on our own?
Or would we be less ensorcelled by it?
Just remember, worry is not work.
It’s too soon to make jokes about this, but we have to try.
We need our sense of life and levity – we had it, and it has been taken away by the moment, not by anyone, or group, or evil force. For that, we have to look inside ourselves and ask if we want the dull deadening feeling or if we want to feel joy?
The joy of anything.
The joy of everything.
There was a time when it was politically incorrect to say Jump for Joy, for fear someone might interpret that as an inappropriate comment about a person named Joy.
But I know, every time I’ve met someone named Joy, they were their name – you could see it on their face, in their smile, in the twinkle in their eyes.
We need some more joy in the world right now, we could write a song, but that’s been done. We need to sing it more.
Reader feedback:
Great Read. Sorry for the Loss of your Friend. My Heart goes out to you and his family. We too are self-isolating. Only going out to get food as I only buy fresh weekly but that seems to be rare this past couple weeks. We are not socializing for our protection as we have underlying health issues that put us at risk. So for the next 6 months we will stay put, no coffee dates, no visitors or visiting others. I have enough books to last me a year. Stay safe, stay warm and look forward to your morning emails, MJ, Calgary
Good new day, woke up... Nothing hurts that is a good start. I like your idea of making more connections, now that we have got to slow down perhaps we find better ways. Sorry about your friend, AG, Cancun, Mex.
Good morning Mark, don’t give up, especially your committed daily writings to your friends. It’s a time reconnect with old friends, make new connections and to take up something new. Get out on long walks with friends – today is another great spring day. Hang in there mate. BE, Bragg Creek, AB
Tomorrow my sister and I are going to my mum's care facility to build snow sculptures outside her window and put 'We love you" messages on them so we can have a visit of sorts. She's got COPD and has lived in long term care now for 6 years. Not seeing her has been hard, but I think this is going to be a reprieve from the hard work we are all putting in, JB, Edmonton, AB
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