The first month or so of the lockdown, I just talked about it every day, because it was like this is so new and different that I just can’t bring myself to talk about any of these things that are always relevant, because there’s just this one current issue that is just changing so many things, and I simply had to talk about it but then after about a month it just started to feel normal, and I just stopped talking about the lockdown and went back to things that it seems like they’re not particularly bound to any certain time, things that are always an issue, no matter what the current situation is.
So many of the most important things that we have to deal with simply don’t change.
But today, I am finally going to come back to this topic of the lockdown.
Seems like it’s now been a couple months since the last time I spoke about it.
And so what do we see after all this time has passed? Looking down the local street, which was full of small shops, and even in the best of times, there was pretty high turnover of these little stores and restaurants, as different people try to make a go of it, but now looking down the street, seeing so much is boarded up, so much is shut down, it almost looks deserted.
There’s a bit of a ghost town flavour around any kind of small retail, that it’s just these businesses are just shutting down.
And even looking at the bigger events, we see the way that concerts are completely shut down, and sports are almost nowhere to be seen.
Every business, it seems, has to suddenly, as with an emergency speed, create a new approach, a new model, a new way of doing what they’ve always been doing, because the rules of what’s possible have just been changed overnight.
And it looks like this is something that we can see all over the world, where there’s just such an opening for doing things in a new way.
So many people are scrambling to find a new strategy.
And we see people moving to work through some kind of electronic communication.
Even more than the trend already was, now it’s been accelerated.
Looking for ways to do things that once involved personal, face-to-face interaction, now looking for ways to do it through digits on a computer, pixels and electronic signals to simulate human interaction.
And so many of these activities that were normal now have to sort of be reformulated, in a situation where we don’t really know what exactly is going on, what exactly the dangers are, and what will be coming up.
So all of this, fairly obvious.
It’s the way things are happening right now, and it’s so hard to say anything precise about it.
But it seems like this really is a chance to do something new.
This is a chance to find new ways to do things that in the past were just assumed to be done a certain way.
There’s a certain kind of inertia when things are done a certain way for a long time, and it’s just simply built in and almost like set in stone and expected that this is the way things are done, and any idea to do things differently, meh, it just seems like “No, that’s just not how it’s done”, like “Why are you doing that?” But now, because the change has been forced, because the ways of doing things that were thought to be set in stone, now the stone has crumbled or liquefied, that now there is almost like it’s almost making it easier to do something new, because everybody is forced to.
Now the old resistance against trying new ways of doing things has reduced.
So if there is a possible- this is one of the possible bright sides of the difficulties that are happening now.
There’s just something in the air, something about this time, that if you have an idea about doing something differently, if you have some new strategy, a new approach, you want to try something that is just a bit unconventional, it seems like this time is made for that.
It’s this kind of upsurge of chaos, that in the chaos there’s also the creativity to do something new with it.
So I’d be curious to hear uh if you’re doing anything differently or new, and if you have any ideas about what we can do with this time.
#trysomethingnew #chaos #newstart