Silver Linings

What we are living through right now, on a global scale, hasn’t been experienced in over a hundred years. Personal movement and interpersonal engagement are being shifted away from face-to-face, to spare the most vulnerable in our society. Respectful distance is a new habit, right alongside washing our hands whenever the outside world touches our inside spaces.

Because we don’t know what is going to happen and the picture of current reality isn’t as clear as we would like, we have no pattern to follow about what to do next. Each day, we do learn more and more about the coronavirus and the illness it causes, which is helping inform experts about what changes in our behaviors are working. As this picture becomes clearer, we will begin to see our way to the light at the end of the tunnel. And here is where the silver lining of a global pandemic comes in.

Because we have no pattern to follow, no past to fall back on, we have an opportunity to design the future we want. We can create the new picture of tomorrow, based on what we have learned. New information, new learnings, inform that future design. The future is, as it always has been, a blank canvas upon which we get to draw the world as we would like it to be.

This part isn’t new for humanity. We’ve done this before, every time we have worked through a setback. From the pain of personal loss to the failures of international economic collapse, we create our new futures. We set goals, create new pictures of how we want life to look like when those goals are achieved, and then pull from our mental, emotional and physical resources to make it all happen.

We are on the cusp of a new vision for tomorrow, whether it is for ourselves as individuals, or for the communities of which we are a part. And since it doesn’t look like many of us are physically going anywhere soon, we have that rare opportunity to let our minds off the leash, so to speak, dream a little bit bigger, and invent the future. Silver lining, indeed.