A Post Covid Plea for Connection
By: Gary Allen
Tags: Self Improvement, Self, Covid 19, Personal Development, Coronavirus

A Post Covid Plea for Connection

“It’s the little things”.

A cliché indeed but never has a cliché been more apt. I miss absentmindedly popping into the coffee shop next door to the grocery store. I miss the hum of traffic out my bedroom window signifying it’s almost time to get up. Most of all I miss people. Real human face to face connection.

In the last couple of months humanity has faced one of its biggest challenges. As politicians are so fond of saying, this thing “knows no borders”.

But you know what else “knows no borders”?

Kindness, generosity, caring, and appreciating and to me, all of these can be summed up in one word.

Connection.

We live in a “connected world” we’re told. All that really means is that you can easily talk to someone if you really want to. That is only one aspect of connection. Just because we can talk to whoever we want whenever doesn’t necessarily mean we’re “connected”. There is so much more to it than that and so much more opportunity to really connect as we emerge from lockdown. As we embark on that journey back to “normal”. My sincere wish and plea is that we do it mindfully.

Our post-Covid world does not have to equal our pre-Covid world.

We will have choices soon enough. Let’s make the right ones. Let’s make REAL connection to the center of our post-Covid-19 world. But what does that mean?

Commercial

My coach has a very annoying habit of saying “Do what’s right and not what’s easy”. Why annoying? Because he’s 100% right 100% of the time. There are few things easier these days than shopping at a massive supermarket with everything at your fingertips or even just picking up your phone and doing it all online.

Post lockdown, a massive proportion of small businesses both offline and online will struggle and a lot just won’t make it. That is an indisputable fact.

Every one of us is currently being told that by staying at home we are helping to stop the spread of this virus. That is true and we can now, hopefully, see the difference we are making. By the same token, every one of us has a role to play when we get economic activity going again. Dare I say we have a responsibility.

We all know the big retailers of whatever sort aren’t having a problem in this pandemic. Credit where it’s due, a lot of them have risen to the occasion and done what was needed when it was needed. However, post lockdown must be the time of the little guy.

Find your local butcher, bookseller, greengrocer, whatever and connect. Even if only for a few weeks. We don’t have a functioning economy right now and restarting a broad and fair one won’t happen without making the right choices. Local choices.

Climate

Right, you’ve all heard the stories. Smog is gone over China. Dolphins and jellyfish in the Venice canals, and repaired ozone holes. Frankly, I don’t buy all of it by any stretch. There is a lot of fluffy click-bait out there, but these stories aren’t my point.

My point is that while it may not be as dramatic as some would make us believe, the planet has had a chance to breathe and heal in the last 2 months. Think about it for a second. In one-sixth of one year some of the damage we’ve done has been repaired.

I’m not naïve enough to think we won’t go straight back to pumping crap into the atmosphere or that there are a ton of other climate issues that haven’t improved, but I do think this should give us serious pause for thought.

Imagine what we could do if we acted together and did our tiny bit for a sustainable climate future.

Think about it like this. We are in lockdown so we can stop our healthcare systems from being overwhelmed and millions of people dying from the virus.

What’s the point if we go back to a world filled with pollution of all kinds, the result of which could well be healthcare systems getting overwhelmed and millions dying?

Just because this would happen over a much longer period doesn’t make it any less real or scary.

But what can I do about it?

Fair question and not one that’s easy to answer for Joe or Josephine Soap but here’s an idea.

What if we wrote that one word “Climate” on a post-it or on a piece of card and stuck it up where we’d see it several times a day. That will help us “connect” with the idea and chances are, even some of the time, it will result in us making better choices. I’m not asking for the world to be filled with “Post-Covid Greta’s”. Small individual decisions over time add up. That’s just simple math.

Self-Care

I don’t think I’m making too big a leap to assume that your life has been disrupted in some way by Covid-19.

Maybe you’ve been furloughed or laid off for good. If not, there is every chance you’re working from home. If none of those fit, then you’re likely to be a key worker.

Whichever one it is they have a common thread. They all come with extra stress.

How we deal with that stress is the key to our mental well being. Dealing with it through external sources such as food and alcohol is neither a sustainable nor a healthy strategy.

We need to go within. Connect with ourselves if you will. But what does that mean?

The short answer is it means different things to different people. For me it means plenty of sleep, some mindfulness, and some journaling. This is where the “connecting” piece really comes into the picture.

When we’re stressed it tends to be for reasons outside of ourselves, for example, work pressures or something someone said, etc.

What we really need to do is stop right where we are and just connect with our surroundings. Where are we? How do we feel right now, right this very second, both mentally and physically? Just that simple action is quite likely to stop our stress from spiraling.

What I also find massively powerful is to simply brain dump my thoughts on a page. I used the word journaling earlier but it’s hardly fair to journaling to call what I’m suggesting journaling. Quite often, for me, this is just gibberish. A written rant if you like. The point is the thoughts are better off out on a page than swirling around in our heads. It’s likely we’ll never read it again and throw it in the bin. That’s not the point, the point is we’ve connected with how we’re feeling and acknowledged it rather than run away from it.

So, what has any of this got to do with our current situation?

Well, I suggest there is no better time to start connecting with ourselves than now. It will help gain some balance when we most need it but the real reward here is the awareness of how we feel. Once we’ve seen behind the curtain it’s very hard to go back. You won’t want to. You’ll have connected with what works for you. That’s sustainable peace of mind right there and I’ll endure a couple of months of lockdown anytime for that prize.

Technology

So back to the “connected” world, I mentioned at the beginning. As someone whose day job is working for a telecommunications company and doing some remote coaching, my life pretty much revolves around video conferencing. Homeworking has been my preference for almost a decade now. In that respect, I’m lucky that the Covid-19 situation has meant little disruption in my work life.

What we have entered over the past few weeks is a new era in remote communication. People from ages 1 to 100 are now “dab hands” at Facetiming and Zooming. It is no exaggeration to say that this technology has been a lifeline for a lot of people.

I have seen things over the past 6 weeks I never thought I’d see, like news being read from the newsreader’s living room and entire live programs being broadcast with no 2 people in the same room. Even my 76-year-old Dad on Zoom.

This is further democratization of technology and with that comes massive opportunity. The opportunity I’m talking about here is not commercial, although there is that. The real gold here is connecting our older generation with loved ones.

When this is all over and we all go back to our busy lives let’s not drop the family zooms, let’s make them a habit. All it costs, quite literally, is time and if we can make time in a pandemic, we can make time outside a pandemic.

Appreciation and Sincerity

A very common refrain we hear daily is people’s appreciation for frontline workers, and quite rightly so. When I hear that I know in my heart that the vast majority of people really mean it. They mean it probably more than they ever have in their whole lives.

This got my thinking.

We often use phrases like “I appreciate that” without thinking about what we’re saying, and I very much include myself in that. Do we really appreciate it or is it just a platitude that trips off the tongue?

What I’m really getting at here is a plea to reconnect with positive and supportive language. As with the Zooms I just mentioned, positive and supportive language costs nothing. “It’s nice to be nice”.

When we tell someone that we appreciate what they’ve just done or said, let’s mean it sincerely. If we don’t feel deep appreciation, then let’s not use the word and that’s ok. Let me repeat that, it’s ok! We don’t have to tell someone we appreciate them 100 times a day for every little thing they do or say but when we do let’s mean it!

So, there is no doubt that the obligatory TV programs summarising 2020 around Christmas will be pretty much a “one-trick pony” this year. But when we, as individuals, do our own reflection let’s be able to say that as with a butterfly emerging from a cocoon we emerged changed. That we are much more connected with what and who matters. We’ve been given a massive opportunity. My plea is that we use it wisely.