I am told that I babble and it has gotten worse with the pandemic and as I age! I figured that instead of my verbal babble maybe putting down these confused and excited thoughts may have a point. After all, baby babbles turn to language at some point.
With the pandemic and no work to boot, it gave me a lot of time to question the goings on in the world. These thoughts are not based on research but just an Aunty Babbling away.
The “New Normal” What does it really mean?
There is a virus called Corona
It’s Latin for crown or wreath
But is it a crown?
Or is it a wreath for the death of us?
It’s really up to us.
The global Covid-19 pandemic has caused chaos all over the world. Just think about it, a single virus particle so tiny you’d need special equipment to see has shown us how fragile the world we’ve built really is. It’s blind to colour, race, culture, socio-economic status, age, the powerful and the powerless to say the least.
No one person is excluded.
The latest term being brandished around is the “New Normal”. What does this rather loose term really mean? Is it just defined by the phrases we’ve heard and seen over the last year and a bit?
Wear a mask
Wash your hands
Keep your distance
Stay at home
Work from home
Lockdown
If we look deeper, we can see that it has changed the way businesses, schools, and institutions of higher learning have been flexible and agile in transforming their business and work models. All thanks to tech-savvy innovators like Zoom, Cisco Webex Meetings, Google Hangouts Meet and other such platforms that offer online solutions.
Delve a little deeper and we can see a shift in the retail scene as well. Some high street brands have become lean and others have closed shop and gone online. And I am sure I have missed quite a few other important transformations. But what we can see is either we survive and thrive in this situation or DIE.
The crown or the wreath?
This Aunty would like to look at the situation from a different perspective. Have we missed an important point in all this? Is this pandemic also about us as human beings realising that it’s time we changed our ways and mind-sets? This little spec of a virus that’s invisible to the human eye has shown us that its droplets can destroy everything we’ve painstakingly built in our world with just a sneeze or a cough!
Is it attempting to tell us that we are all not that different from each other? That borders mean “Jack-All”. That privilege or lack of it is man-made. That social distancing is really about respecting the space of others. That wearing a mask may also be about not engaging in idle talk. That staying at home is about STOPPING the frenzied running around and taking stock of our lives.
I wonder if this is the crowning of us as a human race?
And if we don’t learn the real lessons from this pandemic I guess existence or life as we call it will keep throwing us different challenges until we learn. The question is will we?