I am not going to lie. This has been a difficult post to write.
Like a bad movie that we are all staring in, COVID-19 has struck. And as you are reading this, I hope your friends, families and colleagues are all ok.
So what now?
Well, I have learned a few things.
First, it is much closer to home than I would like and is very real -and yet unreal. We have a good friend who has it in our small town of Westport (hey, thanks New York Times for making our town sound like a bunch a jerks in your cover story) and she is still recovering 21 days later.
Second, there is no “over there”. Who would have thought that an obscure respiratory illness (unless you are Sylvia Browne) from a town in China most of us have never heard of would spread so quickly and impact us here in the U.S. with such immediacy?
Lastly, I love my family and friends even more than before and now fully appreciate that my kids are smarter than I am (have you attempted to help a 14 year-old with advanced geometry?) -and I miss the connection of going to work to see the people I value so very much.
The question I have is: where do we go from here? What will we have all learned from this? And especially in our area of communications, what will this impact be?
Obviously there will be an impact on business. After the fervor of Wall Street excitement on the 2.2 trillion dollar plan having been “delivered” and the 3.3 million newly unemployed come to clash in the reality of quarterly earnings, THEN we will see what the long term and perhaps long middle “U” economy looks like.
But my hope is this: we evolve. That we connect more humanly and more thoughtfully. We pay greater attention to one another. We focus a little less on the “math” and a little more on the human. In our business, we have been getting more and more quantitative in the past years. Qualitative has gone to the back seat. Analytics has replaced the original idea. And there does not seem to be the room or time to explore a relationship with ourselves, let alone each other. We have become a reactive, reductive society, who really had been practicing social distancing by our own accord for a while now.
I am hopeful that just as quickly, we can learn to re-appreciate one another and ourselves. Value the mysteriousness in the other person. Be open for exploration. And connect in a more genuine way. Maybe put down our phone and be present. In the present. I believe that from this global experience we have all shared we will emerge with a renewed appreciation for conversation and relationships. And for each other, IRL.
That is my hope.
Good luck to all. I am looking forward to getting out of my house soon. ☺
Peace,
Joe