Well, enjoying the last chance for a little bit of snow here in April, and my thought for today is that one of the upsides of all this: there are so many things that really aren’t that important, and it’s so easy for them to fill up all our time.
But whenever something serious happens, something happens that’s a big problem, then it kind of forces us to re-evaluate what is important and what isn’t.
And really, it kind of makes those little things that aren’t important really seem kind of pointless.
I mean, think of all the things that we would have thought were important during the normal operation.
Little concerns about some social thing or other, some habitual reactions to various things going on, habits that we’ve built in as to how to live our lives.
Now we’ve been shocked out of it, and now we can really choose what we want to go back to, because we don’t have to resume all the nonsense.
And maybe we weren’t really clear on what the nonsense was, until now we’re forced to take things more seriously.
Now, maybe our reactions will all be different in how concerned we are about the contagion, how concerned we are about the upcoming economic effects, but no matter even if we have no concern whatsoever, there’s no question that our way of life has been changed, our way of living has been interrupted, and so many things that we were used to cannot be continued.
So it’s almost like we’re starting back again at the ground level.
And I’m really enjoying and thinking of things this way, and really simplifying things.
Cleaning the slate.
Removing everything that’s not important.
Starting again from the very basics, and building up from what we really need, and only adding more things as necessary.
So if we only have shelter, food, family, friends, taking care of people, making sure that we have basic needs of life and taking care of others: we don’t really need that much more than that, at least as far as I can see.
So if we can really remove a lot of the other things, now, maybe that’s not going to help the economy, but maybe the economy has to shrink anyway, because so many of us are spending so much money on really things that aren’t needed in order to keep this economy going.
Or, well, we’re doing it for ourselves, but that seems to be what keeps the economy moving in such big motion.
But now it’s like things have ground to a halt, and we can stick to only what’s important.
So, I know, it’s another obvious message.
I’ve said this before.
But just something that seems to keep coming back to my attention, that it really takes a serious situation, an extreme situation, to be able to tell the difference between what’s really important and what’s not.
When everything’s normal, it’s harder to make that distinction and decide really what really matters and what really is the most important.
But as soon as everything that we’re used to is under threat, now we immediately go to the most important things first, and we go to protect and preserve them, and all the other things that have just been shocked into nonexistence at the moment: maybe some of them can continue to be nonexistent, and we can choose what we really consider to be most important during this time that we have to live.
#nononsense #whatsimportant #learnfromcrisis