Me? I am just a symptom!

This year of 2020 will be remembered by how we all faced up to the world pandemic, and how, as human beings, we are capable of many good and not so good things.   

I can only praise the creativity of many of us, the dedication and the help we have received from, and some times given to, others.  

Have been lucky to be part of families as well as communities which came together via zoom and other means to help each other. With ups and downs, it has also been possible to many of us get by if not improve our quality of life, and keep smiling.  

Myself, I have been fortunate to find a new balance in what I do.  And to acknowledge what and who I really value.  Despite my best attempts to be who I am not,  I have found that I value family, respect, honesty and support above other things.  And I still tend to please others.  

So if you ask me what has happened with me this year, I can only say: “Me?  I am just a symptom.  As such it comes and goes, and it is (not) that important in the grand scheme of things...”

Ending 2020 on a high, I would like to say thank you to those who helped me.  And thank you to those who I try to help. 

What is for 2021?  

Well, lots of things I guess.  

Let us try to be instruments of greater and good purposes.   

Pandemic: Useful and not so useful discussions

I am now at a virtual meeting...and writing this.  

Despite the pandemic, some things seem to remain.  The competition, the "I am better than you", "it cannot be done", the “I do what I want” resurface.  

And I fight back with similar things.

This world pandemic has made us more prone to defend what we know, to do what we had in the backlog list, and to express our fears in different ways.  We have had to simplify our views of the world, and in many cases, to entrench ourselves.

Where have we left the usefulness of having a discussion not to win, or to 'move forward'?

Yes, time is precious, life is precious, let us keep the conversation going, but let’s also acknowledge that it is not about you or me only, it is about the world.  

Who are we to blame ?

Let us face another harsh truth from the world pandemic:  We fear technology.

Yes we do.  It is fine to organise meetings online, to play around with backgrounds and discover new features of software applications.  Technology companies have had a field day during the pandemic, and for sometime we could feel that they and us are now finding common grounds to continue working together.  

But when it comes to our privacy, and feeling invaded about it, we become less prone to open ourselves, our households (which in cases like mine also means letting children use online technologies) to the promised wonders of technology.

We can feel in control when we ask Alexa@ questions, when it is us who call to an online meeting and decide to switch off our speakers or cameras, to leave or terminate conversations.  

But if something goes wrong, connection speed is slow, there is an unexpected guest, or even our own appearance gets noticed (for good or bad), the surviving animal mentality could quick in.  The ideal of working from home, avoiding traffic, being able to decide when or how to interact with others, gets blurred.  At this point, we are all hostage to our instinctive fears.  As if we are called to question or scrutiny, and there is nowhere to escape. 

Fear could then take centre stage.  And to this, we could have two options:  a) To accept that things are deemed to happen in unexpected ways, and plan to reduce possible failures, to breathe.  Or b) to curse or blame the technology, ourselves, our governments, the pandemic.  

These options are not mutually exclusive.  But they could reveal that we are still far from learning to live in a new world that is full of uncertainty, fragility, a world that ask us to be bit more compassionate with ourselves and others.  

I feel fear myself, I have been there, still do and will do.  But maybe I am slowly learning not to see the problem as only residing 'out there', and slowly learning to laugh at myself.  

And you?