As soon as COVID-19 hit the stage in all its microscopic glory the commentary began: this is an opportunity to reinvent yourself! Newton would not have discovered gravity if he wasn’t SIP under that apple tree; this is YOUR time to finish that quilt, take that online course in analyzing mammoth databases, find your true north, grow that sourdough head, raise your own chickens and ….fill in the blank.
If you come out of this crisis the same as you came in you probably did not try hard enough to be better. There’s nothing like a healthy dose of compassionate judgment to cure our ailments.
So what is happening? Our values are being tested and exposed to their nerve endings. If in times of not crisis we state our values and then proceed to live our lives, this pandemic is prompting us to truly align what we say that we value with what we do with our time. If we are lucky enough to have the luxury of thinking about meaning, the meaningful finally gets prioritized over the busyful. For some.
I’ve heard the personal transformations that this pandemic triggered described as tectonic shifts. That lava you see flowing from the cracks in your Earth’s core is your truth. If you let it scorch the dead ends of the shifting crust, you’ll fit together better when the plates settle.
Inbal.