The end of the beginning

Photo by Abdullah Ghatasheh.

So, there's this thread from Arthur Chiu where he talks about research done on survival. Survivors of plane crashes, shipwrecks, mountain climbs gone bad, whatever. We've read some of those books, too. The thread is glib in parts and comes from a "tough love" place that you may not have the energy for right now. But the core of it is a thing we believe:

Your ability, your team's ability, your organization's ability to survive a crisis like this starts when you accept it for what it is.

This is an unpleasant thing to believe. Because COVID-19 is a shitty, and unfair, and unearned thing. And it's fucking up a bunch of stuff. Stuff that you cared about and still want to see happen.

So you might not be there yet, and that's okay. That grief article we all read last month didn't put a time limit on things. You have to feel all the feelings to get to acceptance. You can't skip steps.

But the sense we have is that more of us are getting to that acceptance point now. We've been in mourning for a month or more, and we've gotten to the sad-calm place. The enduring it place. And, like...

Now what?

We were talking with a close friend the other day and she said,

"Everything I'm reading is that I have to throw away all my old plans. And okay. I get it. But I liked my old plans. 😞"

The 😞 was audible.

The business/strategy thinkers are all yelling (they're always yelling) at you to throw away everything you've ever known. That nothing will ever be the same. That all your plans are gone, and every assumption must be questioned. Who knows, in a post-COVID-19 world, if we'll even still have offices, or cars, or Tuesdays??

Even from a place of acceptance it's all just... a lot.

We took the title of this week's letter from Alex Danco's most recent post. He makes a bunch of his own predictions that you can take or leave. But he said one thing that is very true. We're at the end of the beginning. We know roughly which cards each country, and industry, and family, has been dealt. We're nowhere close to done, but we're done with getting started.

And the next part is going to feel very slow, by comparison.

What happens next

A lot of us are very bad at slow. Nothing about modern life gives us room to practice. We listen to podcasts while commuting while scrolling through our newsfeeds and responding to emails using predictive text to make it all go faster.

We suck at this.

In our rush to make it all go faster, we've ported the trappings of urgency into our homes. What used to be our quiet place to close the door on the rush and freneticism, to Netflix and also to chill. The place that represented solace and safety for so many of us, is now just an unending ride on a crowded city bus. We are trying to juggle work and family and friends and feeding ourselves and sterilizing everything.

We are staying the fuck home but we have yet to sit the fuck down.

The first wave of acceptance is bidding adieu to our old way of life. The next wave starts by slowing down. If you're bored out of your gourd already and that sounds terrifying, hear me out.

The things rushing in to fill your boredom right now aren't helping.

The unending parade of prediction pieces about a post-COVID-19 world are noise. And fear. And capitalist pr0n. They paint a fantasy about how quickly we can get back to full productivity and high water marks of consumer spending habits.

We need all of our effort and energy focused on how we get to the post-COVID-19 world. Not hypothesizing on whether children will still have birthday parties and whether they will still eat cake. Those aren't the interesting questions. And if history is any indication, we're woefully bad at guessing at this stuff anyway.

Acceptance means we stop living in a prediction. And we start living in the now.

The yogis say Be Here Now.

That's the challenge for all of us as we head into this next phase. The end of the hectic, new information everyday, everything swirling chaos phase. And into the middle part. The I'm bored, my family is bored, every day is Groundhog Day, and I am all out of ways to make chickpeas interesting phase.

People say "get comfortable with being uncomfortable." And they say it like it's a choice. There's a reason we resist being uncomfortable. First, it's, well, uncomfortable. And given a choice between that and comfort, it's not surprising many people opt for the latter.

But the people who say it want us to know that the discomfort is where a lot of the growth happens. And if we run from it, we're missing out on a lot of the deep internal work. The transformative stuff that has us grappling with hard questions. Questions about who we are, what we care about, who we care about, what we want to do with our time on earth, and what we'd trade to be truly happy and content. Modern life doesn't make time for these questions because so much of modern life relies on us not looking too closely.

We're all home. Billions of us, across the globe are sitting at home. Here's the thing to remember about the next phase: It's your home. You get to choose what you invite in. Now is the time to quiet the noise and reclaim your space. Even if it's just in bits and pieces after the kids go to sleep.

When all this is over, what will you want to have done with that space?

- Melissa and Johnathan