My Perspective on COVID-19 as a CF Patient and a Restaurant Manager

[paul-met-debbie]

Of course there is a challenge going on now to balance business and health. Social distancing to avoid spreading covid-19 does not go well together with many of the things we have grown accustomed to in our way of living. So on that level it is not difficult to relate to Wendy’s observation.

But I don’t agree with looking only at this level. The level where people ask themselves: “what should we do to conquer the virus and return to our normal lives as soon as possible?”

I can’t help to put forward another, more outside-the-box question: should we even want to return to our normal lives?

For me, the one thing that this covid-19 crisis has shown more than anything else, is our completely unnatural way of living that has for centuries destroyed or threatened the earth and almost every non-human form of life, and now strikes back at us in the form of this virus. Covid-19 has a way of showing us with crystal clarity and without any mercy for our petty little ways of thinking and doing, what our biggest problem is: it is only because of our unnatural lifestyle that we are so vulnerable to a perfectly natural phenomenon as a contagious virus.

Our living in big cities, the things we do in our free time, the way we perform our jobs, the kind of jobs we think are important, the way and how much we travel, how we raise and school our children, the ways we earn our money and spend our precious lifetime: all these things are threatened and need to be questioned now. Why? Mostly because many of these habits we have are unnatural, unnecessary, unhealthy and arise from greed, boredom, identification with unnatural goals, ego, repetition of bad habits of our parents and grandparents, bad schooling, arrogance, ignorance, addictions and not being in contact with nature and our true self.

So from this perspective I can only hope that after covid-19, we are not able to or, even better, do not even want to go back to our “normal” lives ever again. That we don’t want to restart all those factories that produce things we don’t really need and pollute the air, water and soil that we all are made of, that we don’t want to restart all the airplanes, trains and cars that we use to make totally unnecessary trips, that we don’t want to go back to our dehuminizing jobs, that we start to take care of and raise our own children ourselves instead of putting them away in childcare or factory-like schools where they only learn to repeat the same mistakes that we made, and that we don’t want to live in horrible big cities ever again.

Back to nature – it’s our source, home and only chance for survival and true happiness.

Paul