The world still looks so pretty. There’s a broad blue sky, swept with strands of autumn clouds sitting above the harbour. The tree tops are like sprigs of fresh mint from last weeks rain. The air is breezy and fresh. And yet this could have been a photograph, for the way the world has changed. For the first time, in my lifetime at least, I feel I may not live forever. There’s an impending sense of the unknown and though the world may look the same, it’s not as we know it.

I wonder if social media existed at the time of the Great Depression, or the Great Leap Forward, or any of one of human kinds’ greatest tragedies, might it look something like this. Are we living through what history will one day recall, as the greatest global tragedy of our century? Probably. Sadly. I want to say I’m scared, but then we all are.

The collective, social distancing hug we are all giving each other is lifting the vibration into one of hope. And that’s what we must turn to in our moments of fear and anxiousness. We don’t even have to be unwell, or know someone who is, for this insidious sickness to throw our lives into chaos. Everything we have worked towards, wrestled with, fought for may all come to nothing, needing to be built again. For many of us, this feels like the Great leveller. 

What would it be like for the rug to be swept from under our feet? For all those decisions we struggled so hard to make, for that ideal lifestyle we pursued so hard, for the familiarity of routine we centred our lives around, to be trumped in a single moment. This is the fear we feel. Without our health, we have nothing, without our wellbeing we have nothing, without each other we have nothing. 

But here’s what we do have; a sense that we’re not in this alone, a community of aspiration, a collective consciousness that says, thankfully, it’s ok to be scared, the best minds in the world striving for a cure and a humanitarian shift in what the really important stuff in life is. You. Me. We. Us. Everybody. Everywhere. Because when this passes, and it will, nothing else will matter.