I treasure storytelling.
Our greatest storyteller is Mother Nature. Everything we see around us, the lakes, the mountains – they tell a story about their existence. Over millennia, Mother Nature built this planet into the shape of itself.
When we look back, human existence is just a speck of dust in the history of this planet.
When we first came onto this planet, we faced many hardships.
In the face of these hardships, we had to learn many lessons.
Most and foremost, we had to learn that Mother Nature cannot be tamed.
Like all other species on Earth, we learned to survive. We had to adapt constantly. We kept going and created our own story on this planet. We still tell each other these stories today.
And this story of human kind tells us how we became the way we are now.
Mother Nature taught us: After each darkness, light returns, and we can see the colors again.
In the same way, we persevere through our hardships, and we find joy again.
That’s the history of our human kind on this planet — it taught us:
When we stick together, we will survive.
What’s the message we’ll find in Covid-19?
The question is not, whether Covid-19 will be harming us. The question is what message we will find in this pandemic for our existence.
What will the story will be, that we will be telling our future generations about this pandemic?
What lessons do we seize from the hardships we are currently facing under Covid-19?
How do we want to adapt, so that we can improve our life on Earth after Covid-19? Possibly even in a way that will give us a healthier life, and our children a perspective for a future again?
I had a dream.
— In December, right before Covid-19 appeared.
In my dream, I was looking down through a hole into an empty room.
A bunch of busy-looking, blindfolded people were walking through that room. They bumped into each other, over and over again. By doing so, they severely injuring themselves. But their injuries didn't seem to bother them. It seemed as if they had become numb to the pain.
They just kept walking. Each of them looked down at their own feet onto the ground. A few of them held their children by their hand.
The people looked terribly busy — as if they were urgently trying to get to some place. But in the end, they always returned to the same place where they had come from. It looked like a pointless activity they had resorted to, just to occupy themselves.
Then suddenly, a massive tornado struck through their middle and touched down onto the ground.
Shocked by the unexpected strike-down, the people froze up. As id they were hypnotized, they stared at the whirlwind. It was like the tornado had cast them into a spell.
Within seconds, nothing was “normal” anymore. The tornado tore the people’s blindfolds off, and here they were – startled and hypnotized by the gigantic storm in their middle.
After a while, when everyone’s attention was bundled by the storm, the whirlwind began to settle down and spread all the way across the floor.
It seeped through the flooring and then bubbled upwards. Like sparkling water, it dissipated through each person’s body, back up to the top where it had come from. Up there, above the people’s heads, the bubbles regathered into a unit.
Fine lines appeared, connecting each person’s head to the unit above them. Combining them into one — like umbilical cords
that connected them into their shared human consciousness.
The people, still in the room, were now perfectly arranged side by side, floating in perfect harmony, not too close and not too far from one another. With a benevolent distance.
Suddenly, a spectacular play of colors emerged between them.
While the people hovered in the middle of the room — in their light, natural and authentic form and shape — rainbow colors appeared between them. Beautiful color explosions, in the physical distance between them. As if that distance was made for these colors to appear.
And still, all of the people were connected into one human existence above them. Only in their physical room, they remained physically separated. And only in that space of polarity between them and between the top and the bottom, this play of colors could manifest.
A play of colors, so beautiful — communicating perfect harmony, peace, freedom, healing silence.
Everyone had what they needed in their space — to just be.
In a community, where everyone floated in their own personal space. A space that was perfect in shape, size and distance for each of them. As if each person’s space was a perfect fit, both for their own “puzzle piece” and for the bigger puzzle that came together as such a beautiful whole.
Everyone in their own unique shape fit perfectly into that oneness.
Because this was the only way the big puzzle could ever be complete: if everyone didn’t alter their own authentic shape, but lived it as exactly what it was. Then the whole puzzle came together and appeared as one beautiful whole, within which everyone was connected, in perfect harmony.
Through this process, humanity flourished into oneness, instead of breaking down into millions of estranged particles that would ultimately collapse into themselves and break the whole.
That was my dream.
Or, was it a vision?
The next the morning, I woke up and saw this color play in the sky, reminding me of my dream:
This story is not fiction, it is real.
And it makes me wonder — perhaps the Coronavirus leads us back into our oneness? Maybe it is kind of a Noah's ark, only that Noah is now our human consciousness? A united consciousness that will heal us? That will bring us to a more authentic human existence on Earth?
No war, no politicians, no people’s movements alone could have brought about such an impactful change in human kind, like the one we are witnessing under Covid-19. No human intelligence would have been able to create a language that everyone on this planet now suddenly speaks and understands.
The Coronavirus is doing it!
But why?
What do we make out of Covid-19?
Covid-19 is giving us an opportunity to come together as one human kind again, so that we can overcome the grand challenges we are facing as a species on this planet.
I sense it as a great blessing, that we can experience this opportunity during our lifetime! We should grab this opportunity by the head. We are creators! We have the opportunity now to become storytellers of possibly one of the most groundbreaking stories in the history of human kind!
Maybe our descendants will tell their children the story of Covid-19 one day:
“The story of how humankind healed itself, so that human life could continue on Earth.”
Last year, I faced similar hardship. The forces of Mother Nature challenged me, as a human being, to return to my roots. Roots that I could only find in my most fundamental nature as a human being. Where nothing was left but I, as who I was – completely naked. Without my professional title, without makeup, with no identity other than who I was in my very essence. Within a few seconds on a Sunday morning, I had lost my life like I knew it.
I experienced great pain and discomfort for several months. I was locked down for days. I lost everything I owned and had worked for my entire life. I experienced the darkest of nights, for months I didn’t believe the light would ever return.
But eventually, it did.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness.
I never got my life back like I knew it. But now that my eyes had adjusted, I would have never wanted my life back like I knew it.
Today, I tell people that my stroke was the greatest gift in my life.
I wonder if we will say the same about Covid-19 one day?
I’m convinced that this destiny lies in our own hands.
Like my story has taught me, so has the history of human kind: We keep going. And life will go on. We come together as humans in times of hardship. And we will survive.
Life progresses forward toward new ways, it does not regress back into old “normalities.”
Covid-19 is not threatening us. The situation we are finding ourselves in is threatening us. I’m not talking about the virus. But the lifestyles we have created for ourselves.
Is our system carrying us through this pandemic?
Or is our system triggering an auto-immunity response, where it actually turns against our own well-being and harms us?
Now that Covid-19 is between and inside us, we have to think of the lessons that we can learn. We have to think about the stories we want to tell our future generations about what we learned from this pandemic. How this pandemic changed us as a human kind.
We adapt, and we advance.
Seizing Covid-19 as a Pause Button
Life has become quiet for many of us now. If we embrace this downtime, we have the gift to face our pandemic with peaceful composure.
Let us use this time to tell each other stories, like our ancestors did.
These stories will become our history.
After each winter follows spring. What flowers do we want to see sprout when this pandemic is over? Which plants do we want to seed now for later?
If we plant nothing, the soil will die.
How is Covid-19 changing the world and the people around you. How is it changing your life how you knew it?
This is where we will start to build a new life for our future — our life together, after Covid-19.
— Annegret Hannawa