If you’re reading these words, you have the privilege to be alive right now. To be alive and in the present moment is always a gift, no matter how challenging or chaotic that present moment might seem.
These are testing and transformative times. Everything feels up in the air. We cannot know where or how things will land. But this prevailing uncertainty also means that amidst the disruption there are also opportunities for positive change.
For those of us who are lucky enough still to be here, the past decade might feel like a time of unrelenting uncertainty. Ten years of surprising and disorienting incident, with one crisis after another taking us further from the world as we knew it before.
Life’s eternal trick is the surprise that comes around with such regularity that the only truly surprising thing is how it never ceases to surprise. Yet somehow it always seems to creep up and put you right back at the beginning.
We are somehow half a decade on from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The world is neither the same as it was prior to the pandemic, nor the same as how it was five years ago.
It’s interesting to look back to where we were five years ago. The other day I happened upon an August 2020 interview with Brian Eno, in which he shared some lovely words on how we might use the testing circumstances of the global pandemic to reframe how we perceive life:
“I was talking the other day to a carpenter who lives nearby. He was astonished by how little money he’d been spending over the last months because there were no shops open. It had changed all his perceptions about how much he needed to earn, about what he really liked doing. He’d discovered he enjoyed being with his children by the river… As for the social effects: it’s been so nice seeing people having an alibi to be nice to each other. England has been through five years of division and anger. Now something has happened that allows us to reach across and say ‘Are you OK?’”
I love Eno’s idea from amidst the worst of the pandemic that the challenges of that awful moment in time were also gifting us “an alibi to be nice to each other”. Why not?
Why not use the current chaos and uncertainty to reassess and perhaps reframe our approach to life as we find it today?
Every day, we have the opportunity to rethink our lives. We have the opportunity to make the world – even and especially the chaotic world we find ourselves in today – better. We have the opportunity to begin again.
We’re all beginners at this.
But we can and will get better.
May you be nothing but kind today, to others and to yourself.
May today be nothing but kind to you and yours.
IMAGE
- Pre-dawn sky photography by MJCarty, April 2025.
MJCarty 