Suspended lives in the time of Covid-19: an opportunity to rethink, rediscover, and rebuild.

From fear we've moved to a sense of suspense. Where there are some opportunities not to be wasted.

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SUSPENDED LIVES AND COVID-19

Listen with your ears wide open The whisper that comes from everyone close to us during this long period of the pandemic, while we are still grappling with a terrifying daily death toll. Listen carefully and you will discover that if yesterday our shared feeling was the fear, now we have entered the phase of suspension, suspended lives.

SUSPENDED LIVES AND COVID-19

We don't know what tomorrow holds, and we don't even want to imagine it. The memory of the past doesn't fascinate us and doesn't soothe the wounds of our daily lives. And even the present, the eternal present in which we are used to living, appears to us emptied of meaningMechanical routine, zero drive and zero desire. Just a thread, life that goes on anyway, to which we remain attached. Suspended.

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COVID DIFFICULTY

All of us, from the most restless to the chronic slow-movers, are creatures of habit and even theuncertainty fits into this profile of people. We have almost mechanical automatisms that affect lifestyles, ways of thinking, and our approach to reality. Covid-19 has disrupted this situation and thrown us into a unknown land, Where lives have all become suspendedThe only consolation we find is in the generic attempt to archive the effect of the suspension with ready-made phrases. It will pass. I need time to grieve. Nothing will be the same again. All concepts that are part of a rather banal, defensive, rhetorical lexicon. Why not try instead? seize some opportunities From this state of suspension? Why not consider it an opportunity for change, not a way to remain stuck in the swamp?

I would start from a beautiful and short poem by Jorge Luis Borges:

«I was loved and hung on a cross

I drank the cup to the dregs 

My eyes saw what they did not know:

the night and the stars»

 

Suspended life can do this: push us to see something newEven something that had escaped us, like the night and the stars in Borges's poem. And it can do so around three verbs: rediscover, think back e rebuild.

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CORONAVIRUS TECHNOLOGY

A new necessity, for example, is leading us towards increasingly rare forms of physical contact, such as smart working. Hence the umpteenth narrative about the qualities of technology and how it helps us solve any problem, even the most serious ones. Possible. But there's another side to the coin. This distancing from the moment we wake up, to when we're in front of a computer working until we go back to bed to fall asleep, is also accompanied by a great nostalgia for physical relationshipsIt's not regret, or a complaint. It's the very concrete possibility of rediscovering the unique value of physicality. A kiss, a caress, a hug. No machine will ever be able to replace these gestures, and no reasonable person will be able to do without them with the necessary continuity. It seems like a banal statement, but it's what we had lost and now we can regain.

COVID PSYCHOLOGICAL FALLOUT

Life in Covid-19 slows downThere are other priorities on her agenda than before: there's no longer any need to live in the work-leisure-work cycle that leads to the emptying and impoverishment of human relationships. There's something worth reflecting on, and that's precisely priorities. Is the New Year's Eve dinner and accompanying exotic trip that we have to give up more important, or the pleasure of remembering the warmth of close family life? What comes first? inner well-being or a tree surrounded by presents? Once the pandemic is over, it's very likely that everything will go back to how it was before, even the liturgy of our way of celebrating anniversaries. But if we've had the ability to rethink our life's agenda, its priorities, then something very important will have changed.

Rebuild. We are returning from the long cycle of the Self. Self, Self, Self. As if there were nothing else, and as if our entire existence had to revolve around the magnet of selfishness and narcissismWe have swelled up, and now to rebuild what has become rubble or ashes, we need to deflate and return to UsWith the understanding that some things, like defeating the coronavirus or tackling global warming head-on and a paradigm shift toward sustainability, can only be done together. Will this awareness hold up once we're beyond the confines of lives suspended? No one can say, but we will certainly have had a great opportunity. Let's hope we've been able to not squander it.

CORONAVIRUS: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

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