Survive or thrive?

6 April 2020. Day 12 of lock down. I prefer to call it “hibernation” because although we are “squirreled away” in our homes, one day we will emerge . We have the choice to come out stronger.

My Soroptmist club declined to 6 members. They were at their lowest and one option was to give up and close. Those hardy 6 chose to rebuild and over a 10 year period the club grew to 36 . They moved from survive to thrive and we have been a healthy sized club ever since.

We are heading towards the half way point in our government decree, “Stay Home, Save Lives”.

We have had the honeymoon period, the holiday and cleaned out the cupboards that had been calling for Mari Kondo’s decluttering.

and now what?

The cycle is one of moving from FEAR – where we are concerned for our safety, the safety of our family, our job security to COMFORT, where we are adapting to this new norm. Maybe we find it exciting or fulfilling to have the freedom to catch up on chores, catch up on friends, albeit on line only.

But after comfort comes BOREDOM, where we have too much of a good thing, so much time that we lose momentum to fully utilise it. We become restless and being at home 24/7 isn’t so great or refreshing anymore.

In the absence of our usual stimulants and challenges, our busyness, we find we have a choice to utilise this boredom phase as a stepping off point to CREATIVITY.

It’s not a gentle and predictable flowing movement – but a jerky one with troughs of fear followed by a burst of creativity and then a lull into boredom. But the elements are there.

We see a video of creative ways of dealing with Covid19. We laugh. We sing along. And we are inspired by the clever and creative use of song and dance to express or mock what we are going through. A video goes viral. .. Creative juices are flowing.

There is opportunity to look with fresh eyes.

There is opportunity to review our lives, values and rejig them for a changed world.

There is the opportunity to relate – recapture communication with a friend that had slipped to an annual Christmas letter.

There is opportunity to write ……………. ahhhhh