I wasn't going to write anything about this since most of the interesting things to say have been said. From people who think these are the end-times (for reasons I'll explain) to the befuddled alarmists who have nothing better to do than create pseudo-scientific explanations on what happened, and how to escape this. To them, the answer has to do with ginger.
On March 15, 2020, my wife and I took a flight from Nairobi, Kenya, heading towards Toronto. A trip that was expected to last exactly four weeks, seeing us return to Nairobi in April. The intended destination was Jamaica, where my wife's niece was getting married. As soon as we touched down in Toronto's Pearson International Airport, Kenya closed its borders to air travel due to quell the spread of the virus. In addition, our niece cancelled the wedding.
So there we were in Toronto (actually Mississauga), hanging out in an Airbnb, not knowing when we would be back in Nairobi. It took five months before the airport in Nairobi was opened and on 19 August, 2020 we flew back home.
This was the longest vacation I have ever had. Voluntary or otherwise. Even vacations from high school were never this long, a month at the most. And even though I could work remotely, you cannot farm remotely. You have to be on the ground in most cases. I was fortunate that we had done a lot of digitization, so all critical files and other documents were within reach. But our business is a people-centric business. Farming and Real Estate. You can only do so much remotely.
While this is my first real pandemic, the world knows all about epidemics. There's always a breakout of some disease somewhere in the world. But if you live in a bubble (like I did), you didn't hear about them. It's very much like war. The world is a constant battlefield with wars all over the place, not just Palestine and Somalia, but all over the place. But they are so commonplace, we ignore them largely.
WHAT IS THIS CORONAVIRUS?
Simply put, its a very, very bad respiratory disease, related to pneumonia. A type of pneumonia. It is a very serious thing if you cannot breathe. But anything attacking an organ is bad. The heart and the lungs must be near the top of the list. We were told that the disease was first identified in the city of Wuhan in China. They delayed in announcing it, but since they were the first to see its effects, they quickly locked down their city and surprise, surprise, the disease swept by Wuhan relatively quietly. Then the conspiracy theorists jumped to the forefront. While the scientists were saying that the disease jumped species, a zoonotic virus, identifying bats as the key animal, the theorists said that the disease was created in a lab, a type of germ test. I'm a believer in tracing stuff to it's root, it's a good way to see if there's a way to a cure. If this stuff was cooked in a lab, what were the ingredients that made it so deadly. But the cross species jump also sounds reasonable. It sounds quite smart really given that we live so closely with animals, the likelihood of something like this happening is quite high. I've wondered why we don't catch, more often, diseases from cats and dogs. The hygiene of these two animals is quite suspect, and they are carry all kinds of stuff in them. Dogs specifically lick themselves clean, then proceed to lick people. That's a scientific inquiry for you right there.
Pneumonia is deadly without this new mutation. Bernie Mac, one of my favorite comedians, lived with a condition known as sarcoidosis. Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory lung disease which reduces lung function. Does this sound familiar? Sarcoidosis in Bernie Mac's case may have been complicated by Pneumonia causing his death, but there's a lot of debate about that. Suffice it to say that pneumonia, even without the complications of this specific mutation, is bad news.
You can also catch pneumonia from someone else, however, before this virus, nothing stopped us from allowing people with serious colds, sneezing, runny noses from getting into a full bus. Despite the fact that we knew that flu season was pretty bad, we never insisted that people get flu shots, never made it mandatory to test temperature before allowing people to get onto public transit. That's our new normal today.
Sitting in my Airbnb in Mississauga, I thought a lot about work. Before getting stuck in an apartment, with the entire city locked down, nowhere to go, nothing to do, I was your consummate workaholic. I had two states. On and off. Like a computer really. On means working and doing something. When I worked for someone else, I was busy writing computer code, or documents, or planning, or drawing, or reading or running (yes, running marathons). If I wasn't doing any of that, I was sleeping. But there I was stuck in an Airbnb with limited work to do. And so I slowly started mindfulness meditation. Which led to yoga. Between meditation, yoga, running and reading, my attitude to work completely changed.
It dawned on me that I could put in 90% effort and still get 100% results. I moved on to 80% effort and guess what, still got 100% results. You've guess it. I continued this way till for an entire month put in 0% effort and got 100% results. The world did not revolve around me. Stuff could get done without me and would continue to be done. Not exactly the way I wanted it to be done, but it got done. Rightly so, my standards had to change. I couldn't edit every document, couldn't be there for every planting session, and couldn't attend every staff meeting. But the minutes told me what happened, and that was sufficient. I could still be in charge without physical presence.
Don't get me wrong, the first couple of weeks were pure agony. By the time we started May, I was a total wreck bouncing off the walls, my wife insisting that I should go for walks, but I'm not a walks-type-of-guy. I run. And I needed constant information update, needed to know each minute of each day what was going on at work. Were these trust issues? Possibly. But that blackout period taught me that if you leave people alone, you may be surprised.
The turning point was mid May. By that time, I'd been meditating for about a month and passed through the feeling that I was wasting time. After all, what else are you going to do. Just sit and be quiet and focus on your breath. I was starting yoga as a way of doing something physically exerting without having to go outside. The term in meditation is monkey mind - the mind that won't stop chattering. And that's what I had. And quietening the monkey was very difficult. When I write, the monkey is in full control, and I let him say whatever he wants. But when I meditate, I want him to be quiet. When I'm doing yoga, I want him completely out of the way. And especially when it's time to sleep, I want monkey mind to agree to allow me to rest. But I'd trained monkey mind to be a twenty piece marching band, that only plays rock music on a roller coaster. You really cannot shut up monkey mind, you just have to keep him busy. Find him something else to do, or don't give him the controls. That's basically the essence of meditation. Your mind focuses on something physical, something you can feel, and monkey mind cannot take control. You won't win at the beginning, but over time you will get used to sitting quietly.
THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Restaurants are only taking take-out orders. Students are studying at home. Taxi drivers are multi-tasking as couriers. Doctors are keeping their appointment times. Businesses are enhancing work-at-home arrangements. Flexible work hours are becoming mandatory. Technology is king.
Man the social being is suffering quietly and new psychological ailments are plaguing us. Repressing the need to be social isn't the answer, and replacing it with technology isn't a better alternative. I worry that my children (young adults) will live in a world where their smartphones become their companions, rather than arguing ideas with colleagues and friends. Some of the best ideas have come at about 11 pm just before last call.
I mentioned the end-of-world conspiracy theorists, who have interpreted the bible literally, and see vaccination certificates and other forms of branding as an implementation of the book of Revelation. These nut jobs have been around since humans have existed. They keep us entertained and keep the scientists busy. They also tithe to keep the churches running. Wouldn't we all be surprised if they were right? They're not all uneducated, some are pretty smart, credentialed leaders of society. And it's a very bad idea to hand over any ammunition to any of them. Let them play with the empty gun, or load in blanks.
The introverts are ecstatic - I'm one of them. Not ecstatic about the pandemic, but that the way the world works, is just the way they work. Alone. Isolated. At home. You don't have to worry about telling this group that Christmas is cancelled. This isn't bad news to them. Free delivery to their homes is just what they've been waiting for. It's the extroverts that draw their energy from being around other people that are suffering quietly. Suffering with no sight of possible release.
2020 taught me a lot about myself, about my previously warped outlook on life as a race. It taught me that I needed to worry about the journey, the next step, and that the goals will ultimately take care of themselves. A building of a hundred storeys starts with a single brick. Worry about the brick, it's placement, it's shape and condition to last. And each brick will take care of itself.
The world won't go back to where it was before. Vaccinations will be mandatory in the near future. Masks may well last for a few years to come. Social distancing is here to stay. And perhaps this was the lesson we needed in order to survive as a species. This was a pause, a semi-colon. It's all well, and I'm not sad that we don't have to have mass gatherings any more. We also need to be careful about the manufacture of our food. If it's true that the virus originated from our culture of feeding on specific animals, perhaps it's time we return to growing synthetic food. After all, if it came from our ingenuity and from mother earth, synthetic is a child of the earth.
Be calm, stay safe, meditate and do some yoga.
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