The COVID-19 pandemic constitutes the defining global health crisis of our lifetime. By the end of 2020 we are still in it and even with the exceptional historical arrival of the vaccine, we haven’t yet experienced the full brunt of its socioeconomic and emotional impact worldwide. Our world has changed, our lives have been uprooted in 2020 and the uncertain horizon continues to lie ahead of us. While we may stumble over the struggle, losses, fatigue, uncertainties, invasion of our freedoms, despair and everything else it has brought us, what if COVID-19 also is a call on us to reimagine what is possible for us and together reimagine our world? What if we together can even birth a better world?
Reimagine Yourself
COVID-19 arrived as a whirlwind forcing us to reset and fare in unthreaded territories. Winds of change were inevitable. The dimensions of change were unimaginable, even unbearable and most of the time unrecognizable. We were forced to see beyond our lives as we knew them to be. Losing our footing and sometimes losing ourselves became a part of the human experience in 2020.
The COVID-19 whirlwind may have knocked us down, yet it proved to us that change is possible and provided us with a possibility to reimagine and reset ourselves and our lives. To rediscover our footing, we had to allow ourselves to be human. We had to allow ourselves to be vulnerable and nurture ourselves with a new level of compassion and care. We also had to vulnerably cross over new borders in ourselves and see ourselves and our lives with new eyes.
We had to ask ourselves some tough questions about how we stay true to ourselves and how we refocus on what truly matters to us in the face of the pandemic. We may also have had to navigate opposite poles of rediscovering connection and love despite social distance; finding freedom in the heavy restrictions; recreating joy and meaning in times of despair and reigniting new courage in the face of loss and desperation. With the possibility in front of us to reimagine, we can ask ourselves: what has 2020 taught me about myself, what is possible for me, and how can I stay more uncompromisingly true to myself in 2021?
Reimagine Us
The COVID-19 whirlwind has been a social upheaval and it made us see how interdependent we are and how much we actually need each other. Some of us were locked up together at home, others locked up alone or separated and isolated from loved ones for months on, others had to leave home and yet some depended on others to overcome and survive the pandemic.
We faced the same COVID-19 whirlwind, we shared the experience of disruption that framed our 2020, yet how it impacted us and how we thrived differed enormously based on the pre-existing structural, social, economic inequalities worldwide. Still COVID-19 may just have made us relate more compassionately to each other. It may just have made us see each other anew, whether in the case of our loved ones, our neighbors, the frontline health providers or people on the other side of the world. It may just have brought us closer together. We may just have rediscovered ourselves in each other; who we can be for each other; how we belong to each other and how we actually can be the change for each other.
Examples of community, solidarity and togetherness marked some of the most heartfelt highlights of 2020 across the world. What does that teach us about who we are and how can those highlights inspire us to reimagine who we can be together?
Reimagine a Better World
The COVID-19 whirlwind uncovered the need to come together and unite across families, neighbourhoods, communities, people and countries in being humans together. It highlighted to us that we are bound together in our common humanity and how interdependent we are in overcoming the pandemic. We are only as strong as the weakest of us, and to overcome the COVID-19 whirlwind, we are bound to ignite a new level of local and global solidarity towards those hardest impacted.
The pandemic brutally uncovered the deeper inequalities that disproportionately continue to make the poorest, most vulnerable and those living on the margins of society bear the brunt of the COVID-19 whirlwind. Such as people living in zones of war and humanitarian crisis; in refugee camps; slums; the homeless; women working in the informal sector; women everywhere facing heightened risk of domestic violence and vulnerable teenage girls forced to exchange schooling for marriage or unwanted pregnancy across the world. The unequal access to rights, opportunities and social welfare, revealed by the pandemic, echoes an urgent need for a new global social contract.
The COVID-19 serves as a possibility to reset and reimagine a more equal and inclusive world. Birthing a better world requires courage at the individual and collective levels – the courage that drove the inspiring actions of people across the world in “being someone for someone” to overcome and survive the COVID-19 whirlwind. It taught us what is possible when we embrace the humanity of others and see each other with new eyes. How can we be better humans together globally? How can we be someone for someone to equalize an unequal world?