It has been three weeks of adaptation. While the professionals have been working intensely on finding solutions to the virus crisis, attending to the sick, developing policies and communication strategies, or performing their essential services duties, we have been sitting at home, working (or not), eating, shopping, and looking after children and elderly. We are doing our best to maintain a sense of continuity and stability in the midst of dynamic uncertainty. These last few weeks have proven that we are not only able to adapt but also to enjoy elements of this new reality.
Here are some ideas on how to make the best of this worst of times:
- Put your own oxygen mask on first. You cannot help anyone if you are sick, your energy is depleted or your temper is short. If you get low on physical, psychological or emotional health, pause. Retreat and take care of yourself.
- Elevate your level of self-awareness. Monitoring your state of being is particularly important right now. Pay attention to how you are affected by others through direct contact, media or work. With vastly reduced access to our usual outlets like team sports, exercise, face-to-face contact, access to nature, and entertainment, we have fewer possibilities to recover. Navigate your direct and remote environments in the way that best supports your wellbeing.
- If you are enjoying yourself right now, good for you! There are numerous benefits this situation presents. If you are doing well, you are more likely to abide to the new rules and contribute to the global intent for a successful resolution. You are also more capable of giving others support, energy and love.
- Worrying about the unknown future, while completely understandable, is simply not good. Worry drains mental energy, dampens creativity and lessens our intelligence. Employ all available to you techniques to cease it before it flourishes. Seek professional help if you need to.
- In the quiet of your home (when it is quiet), try sitting silently and doing nothing. Let your thoughts and feelings come to your consciousness. Do not be afraid. They are just thoughts and feelings. As they come, try to name them. “I am afraid when I shop in the store. I am antsy. I feel bored”. Whatever it is, it is fine. So you feel this way. If you need to sit quietly and shed a tear, or put on loud music and dance or even yell, do it…as much as your environment allows. You are not crazy for having these impulses.
- This is a suitable time for projects that require an uninterrupted amount of time. This unique time will be over, sooner or later. Use this opportunity.
- If this unusual situation has spun creative ideas in your head, act on them. The extraordinariness of this time puts us in a unique emotional and mental state that can stimulate creativity that is normally not as available to us in our busy, crowded with activities lives.
- Pay attention to all that is unchanged. When looking at the TV screen, we see a disastrous picture. When we look through the window, life is reliably and comfortingly the same. The planet we live on is unchanged, if not slightly improved. It is beautiful, nurturing and unmoved by some fragile virus.
- Be with nature. No more to be said.
- Have faith. Faith is about trusting in a positive outcome without having any proof that it will come. Visualize the end of this, a triumphal end that will mark the beginning of a beautiful new phase on the globe. A phase in which we are more humbled, united, present and competent.