Winding up for Change
With nearly 3/4 of 2020 behind us, we can for sure say that this year has been the year of 20 20 vision not with the straight forward clarity we had anticipated. This is the new decade, the era of new beginnings in a highly connected world with immense technological potential. The era of Black Mirror if you will, where minute brain devices could read our minds, where robots would soon be screening graduates for 1st job interviews and take over diagnostics and surgery. Instead, we landed in the world of a pandemic, which has forced us to reevaluate what makes us tick, what makes us feel alive, and what keeps our va-va voom going.
Have we been greedy to the point of destroying our home, have we dug too deep into Mother Earth and dumped in her oceans to keep our immediate environment artificially clean and wealthy. Have we stifled her so much that now, ironically, this virus hits what keeps us alive: breathing. Now that we are expected to wear masks in public places, it is quite ironic that technology advancement in communication has created a nation of permanent mask wearers. We conduct relationships on text rather than in flesh, we hide behind our screens and smartphones to avoid meaningful communication and human rapport. In other words, we are quite happy to be multi-facetted in our personalities as dictated by our texts. Wear a mask in public has perhaps been the rhetoric for a long while before Coronavirus. Simply put we were disconnected and not so free to breathe.
Lockdown has forcibly kept many of us in bubbles and in artifice. Our true selves have been put in question as we crave human contact. Finally, we realise that we need to somewhat ditch our masks and learn to truly live? Do we realise that we cannot put our lives on hold in anticipation of a vaccine? Slowly, we start to creep out of our caves and try to achieve normality, following whimsical official guidelines. We realise that we cannot live in fear and that mentally, lockdowns have brought a huge cost to our mental well-being. Finally, as we feel slowly free again, we are being told to expect further lockdowns. This may go on for years, so cynically many of us begin to question the system and perhaps lean in alternative theories and stories. So potentially we are in a catch 22 mode, knowing that we may never live in the pre-20’s.
I feel that as social animals we now crave for real change in our society at large. Are we being gently pushed to live in more compassionate and holistic ways? Are we able to live on minimalism and altruistically? We are faced with this wind up for change, for the greater of good for society at large, not just for selfish reasons. Do we choose meaningless careers to just pay bills and to pay for our obsession to accumulate stuff or do we choose a meaningful path to achieve our higher purpose? Would shared economies become the norm? Can our world leaders become role models or do we continue to vote of people out of lack of choice, or quit voting altogether? There are lot of questions, for which so many of us do not have immediate answers. But I do believe that these are questions that we need to ask ourselves for a better future society.
Our actions speak louder than words, our positive thoughts can make positive changes around us. Ultimately the change begins within ourselves. I hope we can think & act with depth and ditch our propensity for being fake and shallow. Solemnly, let us hope for better outcomes for our future generations.
