Living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old are subject to change
– Heraclitus of Ephesus.
Blog By: Aasha Murthy, Director, Being Leaders Academy.
(This lead perspective has appeared in the April 2020 Issue of the AEL Journal)
Why the Surprise?
In his book, End Game, popular science writer Bryan Walsh argues that throughout history, viruses, bacteria and parasites that cause disease, have killed more of humankind than either wars or natural disasters. The evidence appears to bear him out: Malaria kills half a million people every year; HIV has killed over thirty million people, while infecting nearly seventy-five million, since its detection in the last century, and; Finally, notwithstanding the availability of an effective vaccine since 1796, over three hundred million people died because of smallpox in the last century.
COVID-19 is no “black swan.” On the contrary, numerous articles, white papers, and simulations over the past fifteen years, have persistently predicted that a pandemic originating from a respiratory disease was in the offing, and the world’s collective lack of advance preparedness would exacerbate its consequences. Apropos, the New York Times report that as recently as July of last year, the US President’s Department of Health and Human Services had carried out an exercise that simulated a virus pandemic. Called the “Crimson Contagion,” it serendipitously originated in China, spread around the world, and devastated the USA.
Caught in the Headlights!
Reality bites! The novel coronavirus named COVID-19, jumped species barriers from bats and/or pangolins to humans in the wet and wild markets of Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province, in an increasingly prosperous and globally hyper-connected China. It then snowballed into a pandemic that now threatens global public health, an interconnected global economy and the lives, livelihoods, development, growth, wellbeing and security of ordinary folk all around the world.
Life Also Happens When You Stand Still
When you shred the pompous lexicon (self-isolation, social distancing, personal protective equipment, etc.), your “in-the-moment life” in a COVID 19 world is an absurdity born out of necessity. You use the tech-mediums of connection and collaboration (Zoom, Facetime, WhatsApp etc.), the opiate-like distraction of streaming apps (Netflix, YouTube, MUBI etc.), and the online tools of compulsive (dysfunctional?) chronicling (Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat etc.) to document the dreariness and limited efficacy of your confined life and to forget the existential angst of uncertainty that pervades it.
As the government mandated quarantine drags-on, and more workplaces urge their employees to avoid their workplaces, the COVID 19 outbreak has left many people more alone than they have ever been. Loneliness is an experience that has been around since the beginning of time. You would have already dealt with some form of reactive loneliness in your own life, as you have transitioned the slings and arrows of fortune, from time-to-time. However, the sustained social distancing that often morphs into total social isolation can create radical aloneness. No person is an island and chronic loneliness can be tortuous with very negative impacts on your psychological and physiological wellbeing.
Finding Meaning is All in You
Gandhi’s enduring message to humanity was that our greatness as human beings, lies not so much in being able to remake the world, as in being able to remake ourselves. The wretched reality of your present existence may well have you scurrying down supermarket aisles and engaging in “un-Australian” pitched battles with your fellow-seekers of elusive toilet paper. However, the banal minutiae of your sequestered reality, should not make you lose sight of the power of the Mahatma’s words for your “long game.”
COVID 19 has arguably changed both your organisation and its stakeholders. In doing so, it has also radically disrupted the form, function and processes for fulfilment of your organisation’s value promise in a post-COVID-19 world. This does not just bring near-term survival in the prevailing uncertainty into sharp relief. It also foregrounds the immense challenges your organisation faces as it aspires to exist and prosper in the future.
To succeed and find happiness in your new world, you will need to rebuild, pivot and reinvent both yourself and your endeavours. There is no doubt that when the dust settles, Australia and Australians will rise together to stimulate, drive and sustain wider economy activity, restoring the country to its rightful leadership position in the comity of nations.
This Too Shall Pass
The day is not too far away when you will look back on the COVID 19 pandemic as a time when you learnt of, and rejoiced in, your own resilience, forbearance and unflagging optimism. Stay safe, stay strong and stay hopeful. You owe it to yourself and all those whose lives you enrich.
