A pandemic can test us to our extreme limits. It can blur and warp our imaginations because the future doesn’t seem anything like our known past. In quarantine, it can break us from the inside, brick by brick. To start with, it can melt our weekends and weekdays into a crazy haze.
Our constant keepers during these times of uncertainty are fear and gloom.
We’re in fear because we truly can’t fathom what any of our tomorrows hold. And as human beings, we don’t like uncertainty. We prefer rather being in pain than being kept in the dark about what’s in store for us.
We’re in gloom because we have lost most of our sense of normal life and human touch.
We now seem to figure out the power of non-physical closeness in these times of social distancing. Finally, we feel what passing by that stranger without looking up from our phone meant for us. We get it how good it felt being in a city with humans around close enough to touch.
We are now a planet of lonely humans living indefinite lives.
We don’t know how and when it’s going to end. We don’t know how much more pain humanity has to endure. It looks like someone opened the Pandora’s box and let loose all grief into the world. What we have now is what Pandora was left with in her box — hope.
Our best hope today is the time-honored promise: this too shall pass.
Till that day comes, when it all passes over, what we do would be our resilience. It’s resilience we would show as one person as well as one humanity, for it’s actually the whole world against a virus.
And we are one flexible and adaptable species.
Resilience means the ability to bounce back from adversity. The resilient people also often find meaning in the experience and grow from it.
In times as this, when the future isn’t something we can look forward with arrant hope, we can look back into our past and collect our strength from there. We can flip through the things we did before that went right and do those things again.
When we rewind, and look at the hardships we have faced before, we can gain courage from the lessons of our own resilience. We can also find fun in not doing things we had to do before whether we liked it or not, as taking the morning shower or wearing the formal pants.
In the final say, it’s not a situation we have opted into, nevertheless, we are stuck with it. We’ll adjust to this new normal and emerge stronger, wiser, and humaner as a world. And resilience will be the flag bearer of our every strategy from here on.
Read the original, extended post here.
