Corona, You’ve Got a Friend in Me.
Three lessons in humility, courtesy of a global pandemic.
Lesson one: we’re all in the same boat
Or as our favourite Disney high schoolers sang it: We’re all in this together.
Coronavirus is giving the entire world a healthy dose of perspective right now. For the first time in our lives we’re all little fish swimming in one big, uncharted pond.
Just a few months ago we were living in a normal world where major businesses were shatterproof, world leaders unperturbed and celebrities untouchable.
Skip to now and weird things are happening. Some of the most financially secure are now economic victims, forced to land supermarket jobs or government support just to stay afloat. Leaders are walking a tightrope of fear and optimism as they make emotional, nation-rocking decisions with the capacity to make or break our future. From a social standpoint there’s no longer a sense of FOMO or separation between the person who can afford tickets to Lady Gaga’s latest concert and the person who can’t, because it’s all on Instagram anyway.
With question marks hanging over every day, week and month, all of us are just like first-time parents: winging it.
But you have to admit there’s a strange sense of togetherness in the air. Despite distances and differences we feel uniquely and wonderfully connected to one-another. With no one exempt, and with so many economic and social barriers knocked down, this is the most pertinent time for us to remember that we’re all just human.
Lesson two: complacency killed the cat, but covid brought it back.
A wise person once told me: what knocks you out isn’t the punch you expected, but the punch you never saw coming. No one predicted the Titanic sinking, the Twin Towers falling, or heck, the Coronavirus spreading, which is why we couldn’t have been less prepared.
It’s common protocol for each generation to scoff at the next and say: you have it so good, you’ll never understand what it was like to live through X,Y,Z…
We take so much for granted that I think some of us were even hoping our next collective ‘hardship’ would swoop down soon just to teach us all a lesson. Well the lesson is here.
I have a strong feeling the day we are all ‘released’ from isolation will feel like Christmas. We’ll smile smugly at each other in the street, as if to say: how good is freedom? The local barista will have a twinkle in his eye as he accepts coins and serves long blacks to dine-in customers in actual, real-life ceramic cups.
We’ve lived so long without a spanner in our works that we’ve become blind to the blessings all around us. Coronavirus has temporarily stolen some of these and placed them under a Christmas tree, and when the day comes to open them again our gratitude levels will skyrocket.
Lesson three: kindness is free
There’s a whole lot of goodwill going around right now, with stories emerging everywhere about coffee donations for health workers, meals for the elderly and groceries for new mums. Tom Hanks recently posted a typewriter to an eight year old boy named Corona, who was being bullied by his peers. He wrote: Ask a grown up how it works, and use it to write back to me. PS you’ve got a friend in me.
Kindness is having a ripple effect in our communities and across the world: it’s like one giant, global Mexican wave. Just imagine this once in a lifetime pandemic becomes the turning point for the way we all treat each other.
Life has a way of giving and taking away, whether we are in the midst of a pandemic or not. So, in addition to kindness, perhaps our biggest call to action is simply: sit down, be humble.
