Before Whatever Comes Next – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

The symphony of life and the summit we’re climbing. What comes next?

Photo by Manuel Nägeli on Unsplash

"It is always darkest just before the dawn" (Thomas Fuller). Opportunities can be created at any point in life, especially in the toughest moments, when for many reasons they’re easier to see. One temptation, though, undercuts the ability to evolve we need most when life pushes us to the limit. Here are my thoughts on it.

Waiting, taking our time, reflecting, learning, absorbing and listening belong to a kind of maturity we need to cultivate, especially with this much uncertainty. They compete with reacting, speed, acting, choosing, deciding and changing, the words we’re used to living by. Blending the two at the right moment produces the strategic decision we’re looking for.

The more we’re forced to decide, the more we need to stop and think. Today’s circumstances make choices complicated, and beneath them is a core that asks us to revisit our values and our reason for being. Why? Because however fast we adapt, what truly deserves our attention is adapting for the long term. We’ve done it before, and this time will be no different if we let that core guide us.

Every time I read the news, I see the dilemma between reopening the economy and staying in lockdown (one or the other), and it reminds me of the post I wrote on the power of "and" in balancing life and work. This moment calls for knowing when to stop, learning to meditate and seeing how people, in the hardest circumstances, bring out the most basic values we all carry, the ones that remind us we’re connected: kindness, compassion, solidarity, empathy and more.

One way or another, across the whole planet, we’re connected by the questions we ask and the answers we’re looking for. We all share certain natural needs that bring us into harmony as humanity, and in the symphony we’re playing today, we need to learn from each other to give our best concert.

Weeks before this hard situation arrived, we probably thought we’d reached the summit of life. In truth, we’d reached one peak. The real opportunity now is to see that life is a journey with more summits ahead, and that adapting along the way is an evolution with its own symphony and its own rhythm, and we’re invited to the concert.

My best wishes and warm regards,

Rodrigo Baccaro

This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: We’re all anxious right now. Here’s how to cope. A Harvard Business Review video, four minutes of pure practice on handling the worry, stress or anxiety many of us are feeling.
• What I’ve been Listening to: Good Friday homily. A message that touched my heart, worth hearing again and again, especially for anyone looking for answers in times as hard as these.
• What I’ve been Learning: French. In lockdown with a son at an Alliance Française school, the perfect combination is learning the language he’s studying. Learning together has been one of the great experiences of the lockdown. Duolingo taught me Italian and now French. Easily one of the best learning apps out there.

Man has not had time to adapt to the sudden, powerful transformations his technology and his society have produced around him, and it is no stretch to say that modern diseases may be the means the cosmos is using to shake this proud human species.

Ernesto Sabato, La Resistencia (2000)

Ernesto Sabato, La Resistencia (2000).

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

Linkedin