Disclaimer: I
just hope you will find charming when I spill over the limits of my English as
a second language.
Most of us lead complicated,
multifaceted lives and entertain various roles in our struggle to experience life
fully and attend the endless diversity of our needs. Usually we wear different outfits
especially designed for each role we play on separate scenes for distinct audiences.
And most of us are pleased with such a compartmentalized life for we have seen its
benefits and non-confusing, non-interference value. If you take me for example,
I didn’t show my students the gym outfit recently acquired and tend to avoid using
scientific jargon when playing hide and seek in the park with my daughter. And such
distinctions are also facilitated by the fact that the gym, the university and the
park have different addresses scattered throughout the city and I have to endure
the traffic jam to jump from one to the other.
However, CORONA’s microscopic
invasion released, among other things, an inconceivably persuasive message that
made the entire planet stay home. (Well, almost the entire planet!) At the beginning
nobody took seriously the persuasive abilities of a virus to convince just one business
in just one country on the advantages of home office for its entire crew. We vastly
underestimated its eloquence, followed our business as usual and never-minded the
home office perspective. But CORONA continued its persuasive attacks on all fronts
and caused some casualties until she convinced both doctors and politicians to shout
really loud “STAY HOME, PROTECT THE NHS[1], SAVE LIVES!”
And those of us who were not enlisted, due mainly to lack of medical training, were
left with just one viable option: to squeeze our complicated and multifaceted life
in the limited space of our home and move all the addresses we used to visit to
just one: ours.
To help you navigate through
this newly cramped home environment that suddenly bestowed upon you (and us all!),
and to prevent your inadvertently stepping on the children’s toy when you suddenly
have to get up from the home office to use the bathroom, I’ll try my luck with some
suggestions. By no means could such directions be considered comprehensive or “evidence
based.” They are rather worth-testing hypothesis backed only by my intuition as
a psychologist, a handful of principles I could think of when confronted with this
situation myself. I honestly didn’t care to scrub all the Internet’s corners for
some backup science just because I was afraid to say something or assume the risk
of being plain wrong. Moreover, probably no serious study has been conducted on
this topic, for who have thought before CORONA to confine the entire planet home
and freeze the world’s economy just to test some psychological hypothesis about
healthy coping mechanisms. And even if someone did have such a crazy idea, her proposal
would have been rejected by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) due to serious
ethical violations. I hope you won’t take this hyperbolic description as a disguise
irony for science in general, because it’s not. I honestly believe that good science
- in its continuous effort to describe how the world, our body and mind work - is
informative and we should rely on it whenever possible. But I also noticed that
good science takes that narrow road that lays somewhere between taking into account
previous findings and elaborating bold new hypothesis. And I oftentimes strayed
on both sides of the road, although the previous-findings-low-risk-high-comfort
side is my favorite. But this CORONA stay-home challenge is unprecedented so we
have to step on a new ground, and exercise our endurance, and try our creativity.
Therefore, this time I positioned
my strays rather on the bold-untested-hypothesis side and came up with a unusual
proposition. Here it’s how it goes: I’ll ask my friend George, who is a professional
juggler, to through in the air a few juggling balls. If you follow carefully his
act you’ll notice that each ball has a family of key words written on it with a
permanent marker. The key words represent a principle, and my only hope is that
his act will be catchy enough for your emotions to push you into juggling yourself
with at least some of them. Ready to start? Despite the fast movements, you might
have noticed on the first ball the words separate, boundary, differentiate – depending
on the side of the ball you could follow. As I already alluded to in the beginning,
we play different roles in various contexts, and that’s why we generally don’t cook,
walk the dog or make love inside our office building (OK, I said generally!). If
you are trying to finish a job-related task and your child, who sits in the same
home-office space with you, asks something every other 2’38’’ (that is 2 minutes
and 38 seconds), it means you did not separate effectively your job role from your
parent role. It might be better to have a few hours dedicates exclusively to the
job and another few hours dedicated exclusively to the family. If during our stay-home-in-confinement
we cannot physically separate the various addresses of our complicated lives, at
least we have the power to separate them mentally or divide them in bigger non-overlapping
time chunks (like mornings and afternoons, or consecutive days). Also, one room
could be dedicated to one activity, while another room(s) could be transformed into
playground, or gym, or family meeting space. But I must admit that families who
have children or those where personal boundaries were not in place before this crisis
are the most vulnerable. They are not good at separating, and tend to use the same
fishing net for everything. And we can find in their fishing net fruits, vegetables,
toys, office invoices, dirty laundry, the old family lamp, grandpa’s belt and the
USB stick gone missing for 5 days. No wonder they spend so much time trying to disentangle
the USB from the net only to find out that the invoice was transformed into a hoping
frog toy by their children.
The second ball has scratched
on it the words diversity and balance. We evolved to be such complex beings because
we managed to incorporate in our growth process a large variety of inputs and get
multiple satisfactions for our needs. No place here to duplicate the echo of the
well-known YouTube duet where work whistles one verse and family whistles the next.
We all know about that balance and its significant challenges offered as a bonus
during the CORONA crisis. But to maintain our sanity we need to engage in a variety
of activities designed to challenge our muscles, neurons, emotions, and digestive
system, and this conglomerate should not forget we need at least 8 hours of sleep/night.
I hope you still remember the thankful serotonin messages sent up by your brain
after a cardio practice and how well you managed to subdue the dinosaurs-like-impossible-to-solve-work-related
problems afterwards. Or how lively you felt when an astute writer enticed your imagination
using a totally made-up plot and how this fueled your wellbeing for the next weeks.
So despite your lockdown, try not to ostracize leisure activities, remember that
good movie you wanted to see, and try one night to have a special dinner with your
partner while you both wear a stylish outfit. And if you really want to have a party,
plan the dinner with another family from across the country and have a normal chat
as if you were not using Zoom.
And this gest us to the third
ball, that has the words relationship, talk, human connection. It is important to
be active in our social support group during normal times when we can spend half
a weekend day in the city plaza or invite our friends over for a party. But during
a crisis, when most of our lives undergo unexpected transformations, the value of
having someone to talk to gets so high in the stock market that all wise investors
shout really loud in their undeterred effort to buy as many shares as they can.
The value of having frequent and meaningful human exchanges is truly like gold in
a crisis, and if you really want to buy something now, buy that gold! Its value
reside in the subtle adjustments naturally occasioned by such interchanges, in the
implicit emotional support we both offer and receive, in the reciprocal assistance
for the delicate meaning making process we all need to reinterpret the new normal
of reality. If we manage well to really harness these inner processes, to tactfully
pay attention to their needs, to compare our inner GPS with other GPS’s that we
trust, our internal emotional engine and fair cognitive understanding could get
us successfully through to the other side.
And I’ll tell you a secret: we
increase CORONA’s frustration every time we successfully bypass her social distancing
dictatorship and manage to be safely in touch with our friends and loved ones. She
actually hates our technologies and mass communication and wanted to exploit our
weaknesses for the face-to-face natural connection. If you look closely, her biggest
successes were reaped in places where direct human interaction is really highly
valued in the social fabric (like Italy and Spain) or where huge masses inhabit
a limited physical space (like New York). But we can be smarter than her.
The fourth and final ball has
really bright colors painted on it and the words proactive, initiate, opportunities.
As you already know by now, my friend George is trying to get you involved in the
game and be active. So be really careful and catch it! Oh, you didn’t expect that
and missed! You thought you were just a bystander with no role in this act. But
actually we are using post-modern scenarios which take advantages of everyone’s
acting abilities, including yours. So take the colored ball from the ground and
start juggling. What? You don’t know what to do with the ball because you haven’t
ever juggled in your life? It actually doesn’t matter. It’s your game and you got
to make the rules. So maybe it’s time to wonder what opportunities you see in this
crisis. How can you be actively involved (if you haven’t already done that)? What
new activities could you try? How are you seeing things differently? How your abilities
could inform you about something that needs to be done, you always wanted to do?
The proactive ball you are holding right now in your hand is just meant to get you
started. The rest is going to be history.
Finally, I must acknowledge that
we are complex beings with multiple needs and different skill sets. And after a
minimal training, some will be able to joggle quite artistically with one ball but
simultaneously act like retarded when joggling with the next one. But don’t worry;
in the history of this business we couldn’t hire anybody with a perfect CV; and
even George misses some balls (but I am not going to tell you more about it here).
Anyhow, expect the process to by bumpy, and to feel at first odd and inadequate
as if you are using two left hands (OK, to avoid the grimaces I’ve noticed in the
audience I’d like to specify that for the left-handed people it is as if you are
using two right hands, all right? Ambidextrous have always an advantage). And lastly,
don’t expect to find a somehow satisfying solution sooner than the 8th iteration
that is closer to the end of the lockdown time then to its beginning. But I just
hope you remember that all that’s important is to be active, to try out, to fuel
your humor and to collect many great stories. In the end you could then share them,
when you’ll have a full weekend to enjoy the physical presence of your friends in
the summer.
Note: If you happen to be a
journalist and think that every now and then I could contribute to the success
of your publication, be bold and came up with a good offer. However, bear in
mind that I only write about topics I deeply care, so let me drive the
roller-coaster.
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