It feels a bit like we got hit by a truck. By a truck that we didn’t see coming.
We wake up in the morning and wonder: Is the nightmare over now? Or is it…maybe becoming our whole new reality?
What we perceived as something completely impossible suddenly became possible. Many things we had taken for granted were suddenly taken from us – the cappuccino break, my personal highlight of the day... walking home with a friend, visiting other countries. Or, in some places, even going out for a walk.
We are learning an important lesson here. The lesson is: The impossible is indefinite. The pandemic, the earthquakes … one strike hits after the next right now, and what else may come to us is unlimited and completely unforeseeable.
At the same time, we are learning: The possible is in our hands! We decide what is possible and not in any context in which we find ourselves. We are reacting. Adapting. Making necessary changes, all the time. Because we can!
Right now, the Coronavirus is hitting us very hard, yes. But with its grand entrance, it is also opening up a grand choice for us. Like never before, we now suddenly have a free choice to define a different life for ourselves on this planet. Maybe a life that will carry on in a way that this pandemic teaches us to live, beyond the times of Covid-19.
Resistance?
Sure.
Because right now, this seems very threatening.
What about the economy? Our finances? Our “existence”?
– We are concerned about our financial existence, not so much about our physical, our biological existence.
But that financial existence is something we created for ourselves, it’s not natural for us humans. There are still places on this planet where humans live without such a thing as money, and they live happily and well.
We fear losing what we have gotten used to.
But the truth is: We came to this planet without money in our pockets, and our coffin has no bank account.
Maybe, just maybe, this virus is giving us an opportunity.
An opportunity to become accustomed to a different life.
Just like we became accustomed to money and financial wealth, we now have the chance to become accustomed to a life where we only do and buy what is absolutely necessary for us to do and have in each given moment. Just enough to be sufficiently content. In other words, a life of renunciation that teaches us a different sense of abundance. A form of abundance that reaches deeper and sustains for longer. Where we embrace going out for a walk as a treasure, possibly as a greater treasure than anything that money could buy. Where each minute of our life becomes that way: Attentive appreciation for everything we perceive with all our senses. What wealth! How happy would we be? A life where we say yes to the limits and possibilities that are given to us as humans, naturally. In the form we are, as part of this planet. Because in essence, chemically, we are nothing but chemical compounds of mostly carbon and oxygen. The elements that make up our physical body are no different from the elements that surround us on this planet. It’s our shared consciousness that make us a species, not the elements that we consist of or the things we own for ourselves.
So, what do we want to make out of this?
That’s the essential question Covid-19 is facing us with.
I went through a similar scenario last year and for the past 14 months. Just like Covid-19 hit us like a truck we didn’t see coming, I was suddenly struck on the floor – by a stroke, at the age of 39 years. Just like Covid-19 is threatening us humans, I was suddenly faced by the possibility of an untimely sudden death that I was way too young and totally unprepared for. In only a few days, I lost everything – everything that belonged to me, everything I had worked for, everything I had gained in my life. I was left alone with Mother Nature. Then, just like now in the initial stages of Covid-19, I was locked down – not in a comfortable home, but in an estranging stroke unit. That said, I know the feeling of losing everything, most of all the freedom and control over my own life. All human rights, free will, dignity…gone in a heartbeat.
But I am here, on the other end now.
On this other end, I now find myself in this pandemic time of Covid-19 together with all of you. But to me, it feels a bit redundant… I have already lived through the fears and restrictions that the virus is imposing onto us today. Be it a stroke or a virus, the circumstances and the lessons we can draw from it are essentially the same. That said, maybe some of the experiences I am now able to share can help you alleviate your fears and anxiety.
Because as we know, fear is a natural response to uncertainty. And by increasing our uncertainty, we alleviate our fears.
Today, I will share a diary entry with you that I wrote in my second stroke unit stay, at a university hospital two hours away from my home.
Where I saw no end to my lockdown, other than my death. This entry illustrates what the lockdown did to me. Noted, a lockdown in a very threating environment where even in the place you are locked down into, there is no privacy and dignity, no free will, no self-determination. Tied to cords and cables in a hallway you are not allowed to exit. A lock-down of the worst kind – but with the most valuable lessons for a lifetime:
Sunday, 10 February 2019, 11:30 AM – IN THE STROKE UNIT
My third day in here. The hallway is becoming too narrow for me.
I am sitting by the window at the far end with a cup of coffee in my hand, and with a cookie that I have saved up for myself as something holy.
I look outside the window. I am not allowed to go out there. They say I am still “under observation.”
It is 11:30 AM – exactly one week ago, the first stroke hit me and my life like I knew it ended.
Now I am sitting here – I look at my hand like it is holding the cup, and I notice my patient wristband. A week ago, the scratchy edges of the wristband annoyed me. Now, I don’t feel the wristband anymore. It has become a part of me.
Will there ever be a time when I will see this wristband lying on the table in front of me and when I will think back to this time here at the hospital? A time when I will not be a ”patient” anymore?
The occupational therapist is walking by me on her way to see another patient. I am still holding the cup of coffee in my hand when she starts a conversation by telling me that she spent a year as an Aupair in Lugano when she was young. She says she comes from Lindau, close by my hometown.
Lugano, my workplace. How far away that sounds and lies. It feels like a closed chapter from a past life. “Lugano” – what is left for me to do there? I would not even be able to get there anymore, physically. It is so far away from here!
This morning, I looked at my “to do list” – for the first time without any passion. How unimaginative all this is that stands on that list! How uncreative it is to live life after a list that, on top of everything else, we create for ourselves?! Pathetic.
“Life” means: Immerse yourself! An empty calendar! Noticing each step we take while we observe ourselves doing so – each step for itself, no step ahead!
I check in on myself: What is going on with me right now? My right ear: it’s a little numb. “Why, dear ear?” The dizziness: it is calming down, once in a while it acts up again, then it goes away again – or now, last week, it came again and struck me with a stroke.
The power of Mother Nature over us is so immense – we ought to respect it with great humility. We have to discern it, sense it!
What is really valuable in life?
To be allowed to move: The greatest good!
To be free from cords and cables: What wealth!
The thought, however strange it is, to one day be allowed to go out there again, beyond the closed windows: A dream! Overshadowed by the fear to land back here again when it goes wrong…
What at first felt like a nightmare has now become my reality – and my past life has become my dream.
I want to get out of here. But I’m not allowed to. So what shall I do in here then??
On the other hand: Do I really want to get out of here? Just to land back in here again?
Gosh, if there is anything out there that can influence my life – if I can have only one wish:
“Please do not let anything happen now that will restart my 72-hour cycle in this stroke unit all over again! Let me…go home.”
Maybe some of the things I wrote here resonate in our current Covid-19 crisis. Is Covid-19 a wristband that causes discomfort right now, but will soon not feel uncomfortable anymore because — we adapt? Maybe the dead-end hallway that’s closing up on us so tightly right now will show us the way into a different kind of life that frees us from accustomed behaviors that are unhealthy, both for our bodies and for our planet? Maybe soon, we will no longer see Covid-19 as our worst nightmare, but as an opportunity to come together as humans again, on a most fundamental level, with a “language” we all understand, regardless of our skin color, religion or gender?
Instead of pronouncing a “war” against Mother Nature now, like some politicians have phrased it, we might be better off to see the chances and opportunities in what’s happening to humankind with Covid-19. Just like it has been true with all other species:
In challenging times,
those species with the ability to come together and adapt will survive.
The current situation is giving us no choice but to do this! Luckily, the question is not if we can adapt. We can!
The question is, whether we will adapt.
Doing what’s asked of us is certainly uncomfortable right now. But my experience has taught me: once we’ve adapted, the wristband will not scratch anymore. We will not even feel it anymore. And at that point, possibly we are not even going to want our old lives back.
In summary, when we talk about Covid-19, we talk about social distancing and death and antivirals and vaccines and food chains; these are all important, but when the crisis is passed, maybe we need to talk about a connection to the future we want to build for our lives and our planet. After all, we came here with nothing. We are living our lifetime under constant “stress” and increasing conflict in a world that dichotomizes human beings. Now we have the opportunity to change our lives in a way so we can live and then leave with an abundance in and between us that no money could ever buy.
A nightmare…
– or a dream come true?
— Annegret Hannawa