Suddenly an unexpected ring in your life changes it for a moment, sometimes for a day, for a week or may be for years. As a kid we all have loved surprised. A surprise gift, a surprise trip, a surprise guest, a surprise compliment has always brought happiness and so the meaning of a surprise in childhood and early youth was always to feel the happiness from being amazed over it. It could be because perhaps those days are seeming and thinking is superficial.
As we mature, we realize that a surprise can have another face as well. It is not always a mean to add happiness in your life. A sudden statement, an unexpected occurrence, an unpleasant news, an offensive comment, all may shock you and/or may want you to stay unaware of how and why it had happened and in response you may also want to distance yourself from it.
Present times has taught us a new form of a surprise. A seizure surprise as I call it. You have no idea how long and severe it will be. The only thing you know is it has ceased your life and the choices are to live with it or to give up. In other words it is a hard hit reality. This is present. In the midst of 2020, when everything and everyone was sailing smoothly on their own life cruise, COVID-19 appeared . I would call it a known seizure surprise. Known because I believe it was there from a few years.
How ?
I believe each one of us already knew it, in fact we strove for it through our misfit habits.
So COVID-19, a pandemic happen to loudly ring on our doors on the divinely designated time and has conquered our lives and have made us all its paying guest. Payment is in the form of shut down of social activities and amenities. Shift of workplace to home office, shift of school and college classes to virtual sessions, change in household dynamics, change in life style, change in regular diet plans, the heavy sacrifice of not meeting your family and friends, the sacrifice of health or even the unwanted sacrifice of life itself.
A few months back no one has thought that COVID-19 exists and would take over our lives and change it in a way it has. Time has changed because normal and common things of the past have suddenly become scarce and a luxury of present and luxury of the past has become a fear of present. Parts of the word 'help' also seems to be loosing its meaning.
Life may seem to be running normal but not so, as it used to be. The old normal was different, it was airy and synchronized. There was an undeclared freedom to be involved in what brought happiness. We all had this freedom because generically we had to conquer the world through our own respective routes. There was a different definition to responsibilities. Some we thought were real responsibilities and some we thought were not meaningful and thus we forgo.
The new normal is radical and has changed the course of normal. It is also covert and the duration is not measurable. There is a new expected change in life style as well. To wear masks and gloves, meeting from a certain distance, no handshakes, no hugs, no dine outs, no invitations are a few on a personal healthcare as well as community and humanity care level. But the freedom to do what brought happiness has flipped. Visiting or inviting loved ones seemed to be the luxury turned into fear that has changed into video calls.
COVID-19 didn’t take much time to shape as a pandemic. It has taught us how weak we are as human and has also assured the realization on how we can and we have failed. This is present. The year 2020. The year that was thought to be the fast pace year of spaceships and rockets, flying cars and robots, gadgets and avatars. But instead COVID-19, the virus that appeared in late 2019 in only one part of the world, was the early face of 2020, was the spring of 2020 and is the summer of 2020 for the entire enormous world. Mantra is social isolation and/or to stay home because you want to be that 20%-30% that epidemiologist suggest will not be affected.
Summer is a hustling bustling time around the world and we all look forward to it. It is the time to go on holidays whether you visit your family, travel to the destinations, go for pilgrimage, attend graduations and weddings, transfer from home to school or school to college or college to your first job, move from one city to another and sometimes countries. The entire world cross paths with each other in cars, trains, buses, cruises and planes. This year seems to be different. We all seem to be staying in.... staying in our homes.
But after all has it changed us?
Has it made us to think about the responsibilities that we either had left behind or never considered of taking?
Do we need to adopt a different behavior?
Are we considering to learn and change?
Responsibility directly relate to a question that has also made its significance. If COVID-19 Pandemic is a result of our own doings? This thought has boggled me from the day the lock down happened here in US. My answer to this would be YES !
It is the occurrence of our own doings. Connecting to what I said in the start, I certainly believe that it was there from a few years and also believe that we the humans are responsible for its occurrence.
Now let’s see How and Why?
Nature has its own course. It’s born clean and pure. But it also works on a clock. It’s born and it is bound to age. But in the process of its birth and its aging, just like humans, it requires prevention and preservation of its core. With the increase in pollution we somewhere lost the prevention and preservation part of this process. Pollution does not only mean one caused by traffic. It is a result of means that we use as luxury. Pollution is a byproduct of the way we gain those means, the way we shape them and the way we use them.
We are from ‘The Nature’. We need air, food, water and shelter to survive. We need the change in weather, the rain, the harvest. We need sunrise, sunset and starry nights. We need mountains, forests, lakes and oceans. But are we preserving it for our self and others? Are we preserving it for our generations to come after us?
Clearly not !
Another responsibility that we thought would be taken care on its own but Oh No !!!
You may agree or you may not agree but we are the cause of pollution. Our actions are the cause of pollution. And this pollution is significant than any other form of pollution because it has taken us away from taking the responsibility of keeping our earth in balance. Earth and everything on and in it is for humans. But the resources, the ecosystem and the human behavior is a combination that greatly balances the nature and the earth.Â
The over use or damage to the resources that are required to keep the life in balance is one of the major reason. We have played with the nature. Air pollution has affected the quality of breathing air. Amount of trash is magnificent in comparison to amount of recycle produced. Natural gas reservoirs are coming to shortage. Clean drinking water is and will be coming to shortage. Medicine has been used and abused. Coal and petroleum is causing climate change. Ecosystem is also getting adversely damaged. Families of animals, insects and marine species are getting rare. Forests are cut down. Green house of the world is getting smaller causing global warming. Another source for climate change and global warming is urbanization and deforestation is easily taking the space of animal habitat and forests and is slowly destroying it.
In present times, order of the day is to earn degrees and be more educated. These degrees have certainly helped in getting jobs and attaining a lifestyle but has education delivered it self? Has it helped in crafting the minds?
Earth needs a balance. This balance is the equation between these three; the resources, the ecosystem and the human behavior. Where one loses its balance with the other two, equation shall be out. But here, the balance between all three is lost and so the occurrence of unforeseen force happened, pandemic happened. Equation is still out.
This is where we need to see the crux of our education in our thought process, in our actions and behaviors and in our life style. Because as they say, earth is the only home we have.
So,
Do we have the time and ability to revert to balance? Do we have the time and desire to reverse back our behaviors?
Do we have the time, desire and ability to save our self, our future generations and this beautiful earth?
YES !
Because eventually thought and subsequently actions matter.
Life is full when its purposeful !
