“Coronavirus: Opportunity To Change Our Social Infrastructure” (Thrive Global)

Thrive Global published my new article: “Coronavirus: Opportunity to Change Our Social Infrastructure”

If we help and support each other, we will have what it takes to make it through this transitory period into a whole new, balanced and harmonious world.

An empty Times Square is seen following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in New York City, U.S., March 18, 2020. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

We can find many reasons to complain about the disruptions in our lives since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. However, if we take a closer look, we will see that we are in the midst of a rare opportunity to change our social infrastructure for the better.

The coronavirus’ worldwide rippling effects have provided us with a unique perception test: Whether we view the coronavirus pandemic as crisis or opportunity, disease or medicine, virus or vaccine, isolation in our homes or new stage of human connection, depends solely on our attitude.

Nature develops everything and everyone to more and more connection. As such, nature’s innate quality aims to mend and heal any tears and divisions that surface within it.

The parallel races we were running for excessive consumption, materialistic status and exploitative power, where we had setup our lives to outcompete others in one or all of those areas, came to a sudden halt with the onset of the coronavirus.

If we thus step back and view humanity as a single organism for a moment, we can then see how the coronavirus came not as a disease, but as medicine: to heal the body of humanity from the egoistic, consumeristic and materialistic addiction of its cells—us.

However, since we became accustomed to looking through narrow egoistic lenses, where we each seek self-benefit at the expense of others, creating and abiding by social infrastructures that function accordingly, we then find it very hard to see the positive impact of the restrictions that the coronavirus has brought to our lives.

We perceive nature’s positive influence as negative due to our opposite mindset: nature functions integrally, as a single interconnected whole, whereas we perceive individually, seeing ourselves as separate beings from other people and nature.

Also, where nature acts to benefit the whole creation at every moment, leading it carefully and gradually to a state of total connection and homeostasis, we act in an opposite way: selfishly taking into account only whoever and whatever we need for our own benefit and comfort.

There is thus no negative action or attitude in nature. What we perceive as negative is due to our opposite negative and egoistic form to nature’s positive and altruistic form.

Therefore, if we view the coronavirus as nature giving us its medicine—an opportunity to connect more positively among each other and realize our newfound global interdependence in a mutually encouraging way—then we will be able to create a happy and healthy world for us all.

Understandably, in the beginning it is expected to be difficult to overcome the barriers we have established between us. But if we help and support each other, we will have what it takes to make it through this transitory period into a whole new, balanced and harmonious world.

— Published on March 19, 2020