Resilience
Let’s be real for a moment. COVID-19 has truly shaken up the world to a massive scale with tectonic shifts in our social interactions and culture. Just for an example, take manners in corporate world. Studies increasingly show that the next time we’ll be back in the office, the politeness, courtesy and the corporate jargon-busters for flattering your executives will take a toll, and we’ll be introduced to a more real world. The exact technical word might be, post-modernism
Post-modernism, as long as I know, is basically ‘keeping-it-real’. It rejects the fake narratives, the pretentious structures that are heavily setup in the industry to keep the social order intact. Think about Deadpool, and is completely utter rejection of a classic hero figure, or Wall Street brokers. The obnoxious words that truly have been shown as ‘charismatic’ by Martin Scorsese in his film, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, is actually the bread and butter of these brokers where ‘Fuck off’ is probably spoken more than ‘Hello’.
Now, I’m not saying to start saying these artistic words to your snooty relatives or irritating cousins. Absolutely not. What I’m trying to build is an extension of this to face reality.
Get this in your head. The virus isn’t going anywhere soon. Vaccination is slow and will take quite a while to get to a scale where we can hope that normalcy to a certain extent can be thought of coming back. And now, here comes the bombshell: be resilient.
What this means is that instead of having rose-colored thinking and being overly optimistic, one needs to accept coolly the harsh realities that is there all around. Accept is the most important word. Just by ignoring the reality through shams of fake news, or exaggerated faith won’t work.
Yes when truly accepting the current scenario it will be tough, it will be like you are lost in an oblivion, and that this thing is just spiraling down more and more. Trying to find meaning in all of this mess is tough and that’s where you need to improvise. Devise bridges from your present struggles to a much better struggles. A famous story of Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl might provide some help. During his concentration days, he continuously imagined himself giving a lecture after the war on the psychology of concentration camp to help outsiders understand what he had been through. By creating concrete goals, he rose above the sufferings of the present.
Instead of slipping into denial and over-optimism to cope with hardship, take a neutral and sober standpoint of the reality of your situation instead.
Lastly, be inventive. Make the most of your situation and resources, learn the guitar that you always wanted to learn, write that incomplete book(had to do the plug in lol: quakerthebook.com) and imagine possibilities that others don’t see.
On an ending note, I would just like to quote Captain America:
“That’s great. You did the hardest part. You took the jump, you didn’t know where you were gonna come down. And that’s it. That’s those little brave baby steps you gotta take. To try and become whole again. To try and find purpose. I went in the ice in ’45 right after I met the love of my life. Woke up 70 years later. You got to move on. Got to move on. The world is in our hands. It’s left to us guys, and we have to do something with it. Otherwise… Thanos should have killed all of us.”
