Coronavirus has taken over the world and made most of us stay at home in
isolation either voluntarily or by imposed isolation. Even though this is
a pandemic, it also presented a rare opportunity for most of us to take
time and listen to our conscience and restructure our lives for future.
This is an article we wrote about the possibilities this virus and the
isolation has opened up for all of us.
How the novel coronavirus opened the doors for humanity to pay attention to their conscience
The novel coronavirus (COVID -19) disease has taken over the world in
the past few months and affected almost every aspect of life for almost
every person on this planet. The last known situation where the whole
world went into such large-scale lockdown was possibly during the second
world war.
The statistics are still evolving, but the key symptoms of coronavirus
disease seem to be fever, tiredness, and dry cough. In severe cases the
patients suffered shortness of breath. The virus seems to spread when a
person touches a surface or object that has the virus on it, then
touches their eyes, nose, or mouth.
Research is still underway about how long the virus might survive on
which type of surfaces, and whether the lifespan of the virus changes
with temperature. The current statistics show that about 80% of people
recover without needing any treatment. The virus seems to be posing more
risk to elderly people above 65 years of age and to those with
pre-existing health conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes,
cancer, asthma and other chronic health conditions.
You can also read this article on Medium.com - https://medium.com/conscious-thinking/the-conscience-virus-a3364039200a
Countries around the world have taken unprecedented measures
Countries around the world have taken steps to restrict the movement of
people and discourage all circumstances that spread the virus. This has
made most of the world population stay indoors, at their homes, for
extended periods of time, which most of us never did before.
Why are we affected so adversely?
Most of us have created a world and lifestyle that revolves around the
economics of our lives. Even though a long time ago, humans discovered
that our basic needs are “food, clothing, and shelter”, over time, we
continued to increase the standards of these things so they became more
and more expensive. We want our food to be better looking and
fashionable not just hygienic and healthy, we want our clothing to be
branded, fashionable, and of high quality passing through many standards
not just protect us from the effects of weather, and we want our homes
not just to protect from extreme weather conditions and provide us a
safe space, we want them to bigger, as sophisticated as possible, and we
want our possessions, gadgets, and luxuries to be as diverse as
possible, and have as many of them as possible to fill our homes and
storage units. To support this lifestyle, we started working more to be
able to make more money, and this in turn reduced the time we had on our
hand. Due to lack of time we started fully outsourcing our
responsibilities of health to doctors, our kids education to schools,
our career to our employers, and choosing healthy food options to the
markets. Interestingly we found comfort and company in doing all of
this.
We are taking on more and more identities to feel worthy
At the same time, we started creating a lot of identities for ourselves,
about who we are, our likes and dislikes, and a hierarchy for everything
around us. The language that we speak and the language that is used
everywhere on the internet and the printed medium is a good indicator of
how many micro identities we have created and how much we feel forced to
rank everything. Many can’t say a single sentence without using the
words — good, bad, like, dislike (hate), favourite, best, or better. We
have to judge and rank everything. Almost everyone who is in this race
of building a better life than they have has the constant fear of what
might happen if they loose their ranking and loose their identities.
Even though we took on most of these identities and judgements over
time, not by birth, we tend to believe that this is who we have always
been. This made us work hard and keep moving forward and focus on
getting ahead of others.
This is the nature of the current world and people’s current
behaviour
This is not a judgement towards who we became but an acknowledgement
that we made our lives very complicated and sophisticated, and our lives
are being driven by our fears, likes, dislikes, and need to rank
everything around us and try to stay in the race and work very hard to
get to the top. We hardly ever took time to pause and think about why we
are doing what we are doing.
Development and wellbeing of the world is being measured with GDP
Also with the countries adopting the model to measure their country’s
development using GDP and economic health, the need for countries to
make their people consume more has become a requirement to achieve their
yearly target GDP % growth. Every aspect of our life has been tweaked to
get in-line with the economics of the country — be it marketing, supply
chain processes, retail stores, stock exchanges, food production and
supply, food preparation & food consumption, education system,
product development, vaccine recommendations, and everything else we can
imagine. Everything has to encourage people to consume more or it should
cause less disruption to the economic growth. With so much support for
this model, people around the world felt free to consume more, waste
more, make more money, spend more money, and fulfil their desire to head
towards the top of the ranking of everything. This is a win-win
situation for the economy and the identities people have taken on.
The coronavirus pandemic put a forced pause on this way of
living
The coronavirus has put a hold on our robotic way of living where we had
very little time to think about what we were doing and why. As the
isolation protocols are getting tighter and longer, people are being
forced into staying at home and spending more time with their loved
ones. Schools are closed, offices are closed, shopping malls and
theatres are closed, public and private transportation is largely
closed, and meetings in-person are discouraged. The only things people
are left with are the people they live with, their cable TV, their phone
connection, and their internet connection. Most of the countries have
stopped their economic machines. We are forced to disconnect from the
race to the top. Now what do we do with our identities and our need to
be in the race to the top?
Now the real opportunity begins where people have to deal with themselves and their real needs
People are now forced to find joy again only in the basic needs, “food,
clothing, and shelter.” Everything else is now put on hold. Now we have
time to listen to our inner voice and think about what we really want in
life, why we were doing what we were doing, and the bigger questions
about the purpose of our life.
Now we have time to spend with our partners, our parents, and those who
live with us. We can spend more time with our children and learn about
their lives. We can share our knowledge with our kids about cooking,
cleaning, fixing, and repairing. We can learn new things from our
partners, parents, and kids. We can start making phone calls to people
whom we didn’t have time to contact in the past. The good news is, they
will most probably also be home to take your call. Meditate and do yoga
asanas if that interests you. Find ways to improve your immune system by
eating healthy and doing exercise. If you always ate out at restaurants,
it’s time to learn to cook your own meals and experiment with recipes.
Take time to think about your work, your boss, and your career. Ponder
if this is the work you want to continue doing after all this is over.
Rethink all your expenses and see if you really want your life to be so
expensive that it requires you to work so hard and long. Reconnect with
your value system, be it a religious practice, spiritual practice, or
something else. Read books (online). Learn new skills online. And if
possible, do absolutely nothing for a few days and see what ideas and
thoughts were hidden under your busy lifestyle.
This is a rare opportunity to listen to your conscience, which was
forcefully given to us, possibly for the first time in our lives.
Like every other major war or pandemic humanity had faced in the past,
we will survive the coronavirus pandemic as well and we will come out
strong and wise by the time this is all over; however, it is only
possible if we take this immense opportunity to listen to our inner
voice that we never had time to listen to and do something about that
voice.
Resources for Coronavirus:
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