Did COVID-19 pandemic surface the fragility of life?

Sorry! I don't have time for this conversation. 

Listen! I can’t come for the birthday celebration, really hard pressed for time.

Mom please! I am really busy. Can’t talk right now.

Rings a bell? These are some of the common ways to reject any kind of advancement that calls for time. More often than not we would be at the edge for trying a new cuisine at a restaurant, attending a corporate dinner or planning a weekend getaway. But with the pandemic upon us, all these possibilities were reduced to nothing. We were confined to the four walls of our houses. Was food available? Yes. Was shelter available? Yes. Were our loved ones around us? Mostly. Yet fun and frolic went missing. Let’s take a moment to figure out why.

What has happened is that we have an enormous amount of choices to make. Consumerism is the hot pink today. And therefore we have begun to attach our happiness to objects of momentary amusement. Retail therapy is one such outcome. We acquire what we want and not what we need. 

So what changed with the advent of coronavirus? We got a lot of time to think about indulgences that were packed and kept at the bottom of the pyramid. We took up baking, painting, singing, picked up the instruments and even played games like ludo. According to an article published by NDTV Gadgets 360 in May 2020, the monthly active users of the game grew nearly 47 percent between April and May, while its daily user growth went up by 30 percent in the last one month.The app saw a crashing of their server in the first week of the lockdown. Ludo King creator Vikash Jaiswal's Gametion Technologies was using eight servers before the national lockdown was imposed by the government on March 25. But the sudden increase in traffic led to an outage for Ludo King, and forced the team to upgrade to 200 servers, to handle these unexpected new users — a 25x increase in capacity. So the ludo king brought people together. We began spending ‘time’ with people without foreseeing its looming shortage. It came to our attention that what is essential for our true happiness. Packing our bags and leaving for a trip was replaced by unpacking of photo albums. 

As this global pandemic made its way across the length and breadth of every continent, all of us transitioned into a fearful state of mind. No one knew what was happening and no one knew what was going to happen. Yet we all transitioned into the new normal and adapted ourselves accordingly. We actually got to steal insights about what could make us better versions of ourselves. It was perhaps this darkness that awakened us to find ourselves as opposed to running the rate race for success and losing our true selves in the process. 

Something invisible to naked eye has caused havoc of mammoth magnitude. There is enough evidence to show that people with comorbidities were most prone to COVID-19. What does this tell us? The pandemic weakened the weak. All that we had eaten and all that our body stored was put to test. It may be worthy to note that it is high time that we turn to holistic wellness. Keeping the mind healthy, spending time with loved ones, exploring hobbies and passion projects, eating nutritious food and walking on the path of positivity can lay down a foundation to be best prepared from our end. We can’t really sneak a peek into the future, but we do have a present which can be best dealt with. Pause for a moment and do think, may be a little selfishly if required, what truly makes you happy. All the answers lie within.