Every Cloud (Searching for the Silver Lining)
They say ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ – and despite the challenges we’ve faced, and no doubt the difficulties that still lie ahead, I’m hopeful that there will be a ‘silver lining’ that emerges out of COVID-19 crisis.
Despite these dark days, which will have been agony for those that have lost loved ones, and for those who have really struggled with isolation and loneliness and not having the comfort of closeness of family when they really needed it, there may yet be glimmers of a ‘silver lining’. Whilst this won’t bring comfort to those that have suffered such loss over this period, or the mental anguish of those working on the front line, for the rest of us there may be a glimmer of hope. That we’ve learned something really valuable from this experience, and if we take this on board as a ‘lesson learned’, we can perhaps make our society and environment a much better place.
Photo – Mindful Photography Image – Moody Skies (Dark Clouds/Silver Linings)
I often wonder whether nature has some kind of in-built balancing mechanism, something that restores a natural balance and safeguards the future of this planet. Maybe even that Mother-Nature is very clever, and helps point us in the right direction?
Maybe this virus is revealing how fragile we are as a human species. That we ourselves are part of nature and whoever we are, we’re not superior to it. Having wealth or money, does not necessarily save us. We can all succumb to its forces and dominance. There’s no doubt the this virus doesn’t discriminate – it can affect each and everyone of us, and indeed it doing in some way, almost on a global scale with no exceptions. No one is immune to this virus, or its consequences.
Strange though these times have been, they have given us the time and headspace to think, to reflect and perhaps to re-evaluate what’s truly important to us in our personal and family lives. An opportunity to re-focus and re-align our values as neighbourhood communities and as a nation, and perhaps think with more clarity (and urgency) about the future crises we face as a global community. Could Coronavirus actually present an opportunity to bring humanity together – a re-boot and re-calibration of our global society?
This experience we’ve all shared is going to be a big leveller. Almost like a global re-set – and that might not be a bad thing.
The Great Realisation – What the Virus is Teaching Us?
I was going to elaborate more about the definite positives we’ve seen over recent weeks. Like our communities coming together and helping each other, people successfully working from home and without the need to commute, people value their daily exercise and having time to notice and value nature, taking pleasure in simple things etc – and try to write something clever about how these related to our own ‘Nature’s Ways to Wellbeing’ approach. How the public now seem to be realising that the our nation’s wellbeing is perhaps more important than our GDP – and how Coronavirus might have taught us that. That people maybe don’t want to return to ‘business as usual’ – we are wanting to re-define our ‘new normal’, and may not want to return exactly back to where we were.
Then I stumbled across this video from Tomfoolery, and it captured my thinking much more creatively than I ever could in my own words:
https://www.facebook.com/probablytomfoolery/videos/925284527912453/?v=925284527912453
Perhaps 2020 truly will be remembered as the ‘Great Realisation’.
What might emerge may be a ‘whole new world’ and that might be exactly what we needed – a silver lining. To quote from the video poem – “We all preferred the world we’d found, than the one we’d left behind.”