It takes time to be human
Lessons from COVID-19
Something quite palpable is happening, and the only way I have managed to explain it to myself is that we are rediscovering what it means to be human.
Forget about your calendar because COVID-19 is setting the agenda, we are now shifting our very precious and volatile attention to the things we used to take for granted, we are also asked to challenge our definition of time and space, and how this shapes our identities and choices. Indeed, by constraining some of our options, the pandemic has created a buffer, a new dimension that we can explore and expand.
Rush-hour
Up until a few weeks ago, our conversations were replaced by predictable chatbots where we were simply not listening, unconsciously hoping for better algorithms and machine learning to replace any possible human relations requiring time, and this was often the case even with our loved ones. How often have we used the words TIGHT and SQUEEZE referring to finding time for people, as if relationships could be squeezed, as if love could be confined between pressing walls. We have started investing more time in disposable relationships as if humans were just an appendix, and at the same time, we have started looking at real HUMAN relationships as time mortgages that generated more compression and tension.
To prepare for the storm we battened down the hatches, then we just never got around to opening them back up.
Between the pulling and pushing we were trying to “find balance”, a chronic machine-like calibration. All scheduled in a domino of notifications, no time for spontaneity, for helping someone in need, for picking up that call from someone who is just desperate to talk to you. In the morning we would wind up our daily time-bomb, an unforgiving mechanism whose imperfections — our imperfections — were ready to trigger a tsunami. All caught up, we craved yet feared moments of lucidity, genuine connection, intimacy, and ended up tightening up even more, unaware of the inevitable explosion or implosion.
It takes time
To be human it takes time. It takes time to stretch one arm out and help somebody up. Self-awareness takes time, so does kindness, compassion, love, family, community, social responsibility. Everything that matters in our life takes time, attention, and intention, how can we possibly think it can be otherwise?
Now we are more human because we have the time to do and be what it takes to be human. Now that we are not rushing to the next whatever, we are more aware of where we are, we don’t just see people, we can feel them, understand them, we can share and be a resource to one another.
It takes time to be human.
Society, as we have engineered it up to now, simply does not allow that kind of time, and I am not talking about the mystified “quality time”, which unsurprisingly ended up over-engineered and squeezed between walls like anything else, I am talking about alive selfless human time.
From time-lapse to slow-mo
Communities, neighbors, families and complete strangers are now finding the time to support each other, we ask people how are you? and for the first time ever we actually mean it and listen to the reply, we have discovered the power of random acts of kindness, selflessness and how good those feel deep inside, we forget titles and badges, and for the first time ever everybody understands what it means “we are in this together”, and it is not a literal understanding it is something deeper.
COVID-19 is helping us unearth a part of ourselves that we had buried alive, our heart.
What we are learning now is that we do not need to find a balance, f*ck balance. We need to commit to values, humanity and humanness being one, take a strong stand and become deliberate and unapologetic about it. Period.
I don’t know about you, but when I look back at my crazy-busyness prior to COVID-19 I can’t help it but feeling a bit dumb, like there was something clear and obvious and that yet I could not see. Oh shhhhhh, I heard a noise, it is my heart beating, good news I am human and I am alive.
