Five Life Lessons From Pandemic

Photo by Akil Mazumder from Pexels

Two weeks ago I did a series of five videos capturing the deep and meaningful lessons I learned through introspection, an inward analysis of self, and an outward analysis of my environment, surrounding, and the ways we as a human community dealt with the pandemic.

Here’s an article summarising these lessons and the key learnings from the lessons.

1. Vulnerability is your call for courage: As a society, we have arrived at a point where the vulnerability could not be any more prevalent amongst people from across the world. However, we are still taking the steps for talking about vulnerability in an open space, an open arena of discussion. We are still hiding our vulnerabilities, because of fear, apprehension, lack of courage, judgment, and many other reasons. The first and biggest lesson that the pandemic has taught us is just simply how vulnerable we are and expressing our vulnerability as individuals, as a society, as human beings, is the most courageous thing we will ever do in life. Your vulnerability is not your weakness, it is your strength, it is your most human right- ‘to be’, to be who you are in all of the capacity of your emotions, grief, loss, troubles, worries, ambitions, goals, purpose, intent, desire, the whole of the sum as it is far higher and bigger and meaningful in our vulnerability.
2. Do not make yourself small to fit somewhere: This is not just a pandemic lesson, but also a life lesson that I have learned from very many different experiences and ways in which I have absorbed these experiences. You are as a whole the person who you are. And as you go through life, you will grow through life. There are different ways in which you will evolve and many times you will find yourself in an environment, in a surrounding, in a situation, in a workplace where you might not fit exactly, where you might be ‘too much of energy’ or ‘too much of ambition’ or ‘too much of music’ or ‘too much or words’ and too much of many things that might be too much. But it is how you were designed, and it is how you are whole, you are yourself and you are growing. And growth does not come from shrinking yourself to fit somewhere. Growth comes from enlarging yourself. From making your heart bigger, making your dreams bolder, making your voice stronger, making your perspectives broader, making your network stronger. Do NOT make yourself small to fit somewhere, become a bigger, larger, complete being, and allow yourself to freely explore the possible areas of your growth and yourself.
3. Identify your advocates: This is a follow-up learning or an action item if I must just state it like that, from the previous lesson. To grow you need to identify your advocates. And your advocates will come from different areas of life, from many different ways in which you will meet people who will grow with you in your journey, and who will be your advocate. It is important to learn to identify these people, as they will be the one’s first of all rooting for you, for your successful life, for your successful career, and the achievement of your dreams. And along the journey, they will be your cheerleaders, they will bet the hands that clap when you soar high and the hands that extend themselves when you fall. It is important to identify these advocates and to ride the waves of this positive energy of the people who are with you in this journey of growth.
4. Empathy, empathy, empathy: There is no power bigger than the power of empathy. It is not an easy one to learn but also not too difficult. To empathize with someone, the first step you need to take is to learn to identify the difference between empathy and sympathy. As you will understand and discern your initiations of empathy and sympathy, you will be able to train yourself to choose an empathetic approach towards life, towards self, and towards people, you meet in this journey of life. As Viktor Frankl has mentioned in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” You have to learn to make this space powerful and empathetic. The more you practice empathy in this space, the more powerful your empathy will become. The lesson is to become empathy, the lesson is to become love. And the more we will learn to practice this in our workspaces, the more we will learn to practice this in our friendships, the more we will learn to practice this in our homes, the more we will come home to ourselves in a more empathetic and resilient way, more closer to our sufferings, our losses, our grief, our challenges, our areas of growth and potential. We will imbibe a more empathetic approach towards the places where we are incomplete, or have been jaded or chipped away as we will learn to empathize with those parts of ourselves. And that will result in a more complete, whole, evolving person and that is what we will then bring everywhere we will go. It’s a beautiful cyclical process of evolution and growth.
5. The Magical Ways of the World: Take a moment and pause to reflect on the next question. Do you remember where you were, what you felt, what you went through just a year and a half ago. I ask this question with the intent of looking at your individual growth, with the intent of nudging you to just reflect on how far you have come from early 2020 to late 2021. And if you are comfortable to introspect a little further, I nudge you to think about how and where in what state our world was when the whole world went into a lockdown, when everything was closed, and how far we have come from there in about 18 to 20 months? And if you have reflected on these questions, I nudge you to reflect on my next statement. Isn’t it fabulous, magical even, that when the entire world i.e. the people of the world went inside, locked themselves up, stopped functioning in the way we were accustomed to, and yet the world kept running on its own? We had food, we had water, we had a roof, we had work, we had family, we had loved ones, we had hobbies, we had babies, we had weddings, we had funerals, we had everything happening in this period. Every morning the sun was rising without fail, the moon showed up consistently on the days it was supposed to, the birds were free and flying, the trees were growing, and shedding and then growing again. The earth kept spinning and the universe kept functioning in the mysterious ways it does. That is the magical way of the world, and it is a beautiful energy that you can fill your whole self with if you open yourself up to these magical ways of the world. The mere fact that you are alive and well, healthy and vaccinated, recovering and growing, dreaming and aiming for a future, despite the pandemic, evolving from this pandemic, is proof of the mysterious ways of the world. Imbibe this mysterious energy and allow yourself to grow from this place of faith, strength, courage, acceptance, positive energy, and magical mystery that reaches you.

Hope you enjoyed reading this article and it gave you some positivity and food for thought. If you’d like to watch my videos (still an amateur at it, barely just learning to record myself on camera) you can visit my Instagram page.

Thank you for reading. Please do leave your comment and engage in this conversation :)