We all have somewhere a lost paradise. For many is their childhood with its worry free discovery experiences….for others is some special life experience or period: the first time falling in love, a pleasant/calm and relaxing holiday, an adventure…a new job, a successful project….the hope for a better life.
Since the Covid19 pandemic (I was calling it for more than 3 months… situation, never pandemic), we all lost a paradise. No matter how good or bad our life was, what we had until the beginning of this year, or even the prospective we were thinking about, our plans, the little glimpse of the future we all try to have from time to time: it is gone. (If you do not think so, and you roll your eyes reading this, you might be still in denial.) Writing this down now makes harder to believe it, but faster to accept it.
I think I have been like many of you: I took the lockdown as an experiment, a necessary one but still experiment. Even though I was talking with medical doctors, pharmacists, psychologists, people in general, and I was reading a lot, I was still having somewhere in my head the idea that somehow this will be over…sooner or later.
I was watching old movies and many times I was thinking that this or that situation will simply not be possible for a while: concerts with full stadiums, dancing (and sweating) until the morning like in Dirty dancing, having all your friends and family invited for an anniversary at your home, going in holiday and meetings friends living in 4 corners of the world…And I wished I would have danced more or organized more parties in the last years….
In the HBR I was reading an article about grief and how we are going through it during this period. I was discussing this with a friend the other day, starting form the fact that many people seem to feel or express a lot of sadness these days. And my friend said: “you know, when I lost my mother, which was not expected and I was definitely devastated by it, I did feel like you say….but now is just never ending”.
Yes, we are in a never-ending grief about our lost paradise, no matter how good or bad it was before, we do perceive it now as…much better. And as long we will not accept that we will never find it back, exactly as it was, we will not go out of this grief circle.
I realized that, in spite following the rules (distancing, masks, disinfectants) as much as possible, concentrating on the present, I was still waiting for it to end. Why? Because the paradise felt only lost, not dead. Many cultures have ceremonials for funerals, things helping us to realize the situation, to say good-bye and move forward. When a situation simply changes, when we lose a job, or the prospective of a job, when a contract is just post-pone (indefinitely), when every gathering of people bears a risk, when there is a crisis…there is no ceremonial…there is no funeral. The lockdown should have been the funeral. The way to say good-bye and move forward.The very idea that we will go back to “normal” soon, it is not helping.
We need to move forward, find a new and better way to live and work. We need to construct a new paradise, maybe this time, a real one. Like Elisabeth Gilbert wrote in her famous book Eat, Pray, Love: “Ruin is a gift, ruin is the road to transformation”. No matter what you think the world was before the pandemic, now it is a ruin, maybe something to turn down and build a new. Wearing a mask and following sanitary rules is not obedience, is protection and if you want to be free is by daring to build a new world and use your imagination. Faster we adapt to this thought, faster is going to happen our adaptation, and we will find solutions, truly new and creative ones.
Let go of your imagination and think forward: think of an work organization you never experienced before, of connecting with people in different ways, of connecting with nature, replacing a hug with a gratitude letter, traveling in new ways, relaxing in holiday you never had before, free from what was set for us by past generations…free from expectations…
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