Episode 7: Even If We Could Go Back, We Shouldn’t Want To

Hello my friends.

The other day a friend of mine shared something I found to be incredibly profound.

We were talking about resilience — which is, I suspect, something many of us would like more of right now — and he said…

We often talk about resilience as bouncing back, right?

Well, at its best, resilience actually doesn’t bounce BACK

It bounces FORWARD

I love this

As you know, right now there’s a lot of conversation about the “new normal”

And if you watched Episode 4, you know how I feel about that phrase

So, in active co-creation of our “next normal,” how can we bounce forward?

In many respects, i believe forward is the only option we have 

Going “back” is an illusion.

 As far as we know, the universe only expands in one direction and that’s forward. 

We can’t un-see all we’ve seen during this time.

We can’t un-feel what it felt like to have more autonomy and freedom and flexibility 

If we’re parents, we can’t forget the moments of joy our kids gave us between our work projects

And let’s be clear, those same kiddos also gave us some stressful moments, too

But more often than not their smiles lifted me up in a truly powerful way — when I was able to stop long enough to actually SEE them

So, if we even could go back, which I don’t believe we can, in so many ways we shouldn’t want to

Don’t get me wrong, some things will be wonderful — eating out, and seeing movies, and gathering with friends in the park… all beautiful things, and I can’t wait to do them again.

But for so very many of us, when it comes to WORK especially, the last normal was mostly a gigantic existential disappointment

When it comes to those things, it would be a tremendous WASTE to go back — we would have gone through this entire experience and have learned nothing from it

SO, when we think about going back to normal, let’s be very thoughtful and intentional about which parts of normal are worth going back to.

My friend Mark put this quite eloquently — he said, “I don’t want our last normal to be our next normal”

WE get to create the future we want, so I vote we make it a better one.

See you next time.