It’s A Difficult Time, Let’s Use It To Improve Ourselves

Each era is marked by a crisis of greater or lesser magnitude. Our predecessors had to face wars, our successors will most certainly be at the foot of the wall and will suffer the full impact of climate change in its most immediate and daily form. We are in a way a transition generation, and as such we have a role to play. The current threat posed by the pandemic is perhaps the only great evil of our generation. So how can we complain when we compare our forefathers, who are grappling with the greatest abjections of war, and our descendants, whose future happiness is all the more uncertain on a battered planet?

We are a pivotal generation among so many others that history has known, this does not however relieve us of the responsibility to improve our level of consciousness in order to both live happily and guarantee a certain harmony for future generations.

A crisis puts us at the end of our rope. What is today a health crisis will soon become an exclusively economic one. We must draw on our intellectual, physical, emotional and spiritual resources to face it.

The selfishness and rivalry that have in some ways characterized our relations both individually and collectively should give way to a pragmatism of solidarity. Our species has only survived since its origins by its capacity for conciliation and mutual aid in the face of much stronger predators who relied solely on their strength. We should reactivate this characteristic so deeply rooted in us. For it to manifest itself at a collective level, we must recognize at an individual level that the harms of the current crisis are obstacles to a better self. We can overcome these challenges to grow the different dimensions of our being in the way a bodybuilder uses the dumbbells that will develop his muscles.

As paradoxical as it may seem, this crisis will most certainly develop in us a certain frugality which could be the source of our generosity towards our contemporaries and future generations. We cannot give what we have not been able to spare. This explains why all the efforts we are making today to overcome this challenge in the best possible way will produce greater wisdom on a global level. We will relearn the true value of things and we will be better able to recognize the distress of others since we have been through difficult times.

These words may seem naive in view of the gulf that separates daily reality from people on the other side of the world. However, I believe that this piece of suffering shared on a global scale can only lead to better mutual understanding and compassion.