HOCUS FOCUS – SHOCKED, and ODD
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Sometimes I have trouble containing thoughts in my head, not letting them spill out my mouth when I am frustrated with someone.
Sometimes that’s a friend or client, a neighbor, or stranger driving carelessly in the next lane. In those moments of effing rage, I remind myself I am not a young, large, and bulked-up man.
Biting your tongue works, if you don’t mind the build-up of scar tissue across your tongue.
Ability to hold one’s temper, restrain rage, and lose the urge to tell someone how ridiculous they are being should wane with age, right?
I’m finding this shows up less often (a pandemic shutdown does reduce interactions), but it is more visceral. [ I looked up symptoms of dementia – and this doesn’t seem to fit. My faculties are intact, but I think what I’ve lost is my sense of restraint when it comes to watching/listening when stupid people do stupid things. I get incensed more easily about some things. ]
And more mellow about others.
Most of us who see our lives diminished, limited, or harnessed are not suffering real hardship.
Imagine living in Brazil where bodies are being piled up like cordwood because their president maintained the virus is a hoax, or consider living in India, or Africa …
We’ve all been shocked, felt awe, been shut down, closed down, social-distanced, and paralyzed by COVID-19. We’ve learned new vocabulary and to appreciate wide-ranging confusion and differences of opinion on what to do, when to do it, and how to get through it …
Which is interesting because nobody knows much for sure.
I don’t have a decade to waste ‘adjusting to what is going to be new.’
I’ve elected to focus my attention to my view, my version, of what the future will hold – and then marshal my efforts, energy, time, and resources in those directions. The results may not lead to success, prosperity, or celebrated brilliance – but they will be my results.
I’ve decided to break my analysis into what I know, what I don’t know, and what I cannot know.
What I know: I am alive, healthy, active-eager, have lots of experience at many things, need-want to make a good living, the earth will keep revolving, women will continue to be both extraordinary and near-impossible to understand.
What I don’t know: I have no inside track or wisdom on how the economy, governments, societies, industries, and the dynamic of human interaction will unfold – whether riots and burning police stations will be the norm, or if peace rallies will overtake us.
What I cannot know: is what anyone else will do. I can guess, listen to talking-heads on the tube, or whether my instincts, my moral compass, and my experience will carry me through.
In a few years – across the broad spectrum of fiction and non-fiction writing, we will examine the evidence through journalistic, academic, and sci-fi movie lenses to know what has really happened here.
We will see what survives, what doesn’t, we will see who thrives, and why. We will see a picture of a better life – or not.
The facts won’t change, but everyone will have their own view of the value of this pandemic moment in history and our experiences coming through it all.
Whether the world is a better place or not is, in my view, not in doubt. It will be better, cleaner, safer, and more prepared than ever for ‘the next bad thing which comes along,’ but that is not the primary question.
The question is whether the world will be a happier place?
My guess today is a fearful one because I feel it will be a 50/50 break, or worse.
Of all things I cannot know but find essential to believe right now, is that the world WILL BE a happier place. If we as a species will thrive and survive, we need all the science, hard-measures, and financial burdens to be borne – but there is little value in a future of prosperity, technology, and sustainability if, first and foremost, we are not happy.
Reader feedback:
This made me think of you and your quotes. [ Your Insight of the Day - True leaders don't invest in buildings...They invest in people. Why? Because success without a successor is a failure. – Myles Munroe ] A good site. Hope all is going well for you and yours in these crazy times, SH, Okotoks, AB
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