3 Things to Help in a Crisis! Inspired by Covid 19

So, a few years ago I was driving my car and the brakes stopped working. I had never experienced anything like that before, so I had no idea that amongst other routine things, your car needs to have the brake fluid topped. So, I called my dad and he explained about the brake fluid and told me to put some in and I did but it all just leaked out.

A few days later my dad came to look at the car and he discovered that someone had actually tried to cut my brake lines. The brakes and brake lines were made out of metal and someone had tried to file through the lines. I must’ve disturbed them because they didn’t finish the job and actually left the file in the line! They had only managed to saw part way through and so the fluid leaked out slowly and my brakes stopped working just as slowly. Whoever tried to kill me did a very poor job of it!

I never really found out who it was, but the experience was kind of life-changing for me. I basically had to look at my life in a whole different way and one of the things that I realized was that I was not living my life the way I wanted to live it. I was living to please my parents or my grandparents, my uncles or my aunts, my brothers or my sisters or my friends or my significant other and whoever else was in my life. I was trying to make them happy and I wasn’t living life for me and that really kind of hit me hard, like death.

I don’t really have the biggest problem with death. To be honest, I’m not afraid of death but boy am I afraid of not living my life for me and what I realized then is that I wouldn’t have been happy if I had died then. If I had died with my life the way it was then and I made an immediate effort after that to really do things for me. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that I don’t love all those other people, but they’re living their own lives and that’s how it should be. They need to live their lives, and not try to live or control mine and equally, I need to live my life and not try to control other’s lives. That extends to telling others how to live their lives because you know, I really feel like that’s a kind of sickness that runs through the American culture. This idea that we have to be and act a certain way and I don’t know when it started, maybe in the 1950s? Go back further in our history, back to say the 1800s when the pioneers settled on ranches, there wasn’t as much pressure for everyone to be this way or that. Of course, there were some rules about dress code and behavior, but on the whole, people were just trying to survive.

Anyway, I want to talk about the novel coronavirus, Covid-19, in terms of the opportunity that we have right now to look at our lives. It’s a very scary time. I know a lot of people are scared and I know that I’ve experienced a lot of emotions recently. I was diagnosed with severe depression a couple of years ago and I have actively taken steps to break myself out of this depression and the things that I do to actually feel better on a day to day basis have made me realize that this is an opportunity to examine all of our different emotions.

1. We have a chance to examine happiness and what the make up of it is. The chance to examine everything that we feel when we’re all by ourselves and look at our emotions and maybe now is a good time to really experience them. Not run but examine. We’re so busy working, so busy doing things for other people, so busy living life, so busy coping, that we don’t really look at where we are and let ourselves just feel and embrace those emotions. It’s important to do this. Running from emotions and pain only stock piles more of them.

Another thing that is so beautiful about being locked up for days, is that we have an opportunity to look at our lives and ask ourselves if we are really living it for us or to examine what areas of our lives we might be unhappy with and what we can do to change those areas. For example, am I truly happy doing this or doing that, or am I doing that to make somebody else happy? After all, the most important person that should be happy in our lives, is us!

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t want the people in our lives to be happy, but I am saying that you should put your own oxygen mask on first. You cannot help others if you’re struggling yourself. The reality is that there are a lot of areas that we can look at in our lives and maybe look at ways to improve them or clean them up, move in fresh directions. I’m not suggesting that an unhappy marriage or any relationship should immediately end in divorce, but maybe it’s time for a conversation about anything at first and then maybe about things that are not so comfortable, by talking you can make a positive change.

But it’s a slow process. It starts by looking at it first and identifying what the nature of the relationship is or what you’re doing for other people and maybe saying “I don’t want to do this anymore. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you, or that I don’t want to take care of you, it just means that I need to take care of myself a little bit more.”

2.The next thing that I feel is very important during this time is to examine your goals. I’ve been to a lot of goal seminars and evaluated my dreams and goals, and one of the things I realized is that they say “Oh find your purpose” and I’m sitting here trying to find my purpose and people with purpose, and it kind of hit me that we might be in lockdown for up to 12-months. I highly doubt it, but it’s a possibility. A lot of people could riot in the streets and people could die and those with mental illnesses could find themselves really struggling. All these other things are being stirred up inside of a lot of people and you know how unhealthy this is. People are going to lose their businesses, people are going to lose their spouses, and their families to this financial devastation which can sometimes be even worse, and this can also cause illnesses.

We all experienced that back in the crash of 2008, but a lot of younger people don’t know because we’ve had eight years of a horrible economy, so they don’t even know how good it could be in this country, and now it just gets worse. But that’s what I’m trying to say, now we have an opportunity to look at our lives and ask ourselves “what if I lost everything or if I died or if I lost a loved one, would I be okay? And what are my dreams and what are my real goals, am I living every moment of my life towards reaching them?”

And yes, you can have more than one, you can have multiple goals and multiple dreams, after all, dreaming is free. Do I believe that you’ll have more chance of achieving your goals if you have fewer of them? No. Do I believe that there’s only one goal out there for every person? No.

It’s a lot like the concept of there being only one soulmate out there for each person. Even as a kid that didn’t make sense to me because there are so many people in the world and there are a lot of people you can be compatible with and a lot of people you can be uncomfortable with. It’s just a matter of finding that person that you’re compatible with, the one who’ll like spending time with you, like creating with you and who you can just be open to sharing yourself with and communicating with. So many couples that seem happy on the surface really aren’t and those that I know truly are happy don’t believe in a soul mate, they believe in partnerships and relationships and work (in a good way), so why would there only be one goal or one dream per person?

You know, we have the capacity to imagine and to dream and to create goals, all we could ever want. It’s always interesting to write down our dreams and then look back in a few years from now and see that we wanted to be a singer or a vet or a painter but that wasn’t where life or our passions led us. I realize how a lot of these seminars and these self-help things really fall short by not helping us to embrace the multitude of goals and dreams that we might have. .

The truth is, we can dream as much as we want and we can change our mind as often as we want and nobody else gets to tell us nor insist that we only have one dream. As a kid I wanted to be a doctor because that was my dream when I was a kid and maybe my life would have been better if I was a doctor, but it’s not the dream I pursued. Also, we don’t have to tell our friends and families our dreams if we don’t think they’ll support us. We can find people to share them with, people that are going to listen and be supportive and creative and helpful.

There’s a mentality of scarcity and there really is no scarcity on dreaming and abundance and beauty and envisioning a whole new life every day and living it. So, that’s another thing that we can take the time to work through while we’re under lockdown, we can take the time to dream as big as we want, we can take the time to create a life that’s worth living in for ourselves. Maybe it’s not worth living for your friend or the neighbor down the street or whoever else, but it’s worth living for us because it’s what we wanted and what we created and a lot of people just kind of let life happen to them without real direction, “oh I’ve met this beautiful girl and now I’m in love and yada, yada, yada” but in reality, when you make a choice to live life with purpose, you know you can create it and then say “I’m going to meet a beautiful girl blah, blah, blah” and you can manifest that goal, a wonderful person that you communicate well with, that you have a lot of fun with and who enriched your life.

But again I’m not trying to tell you what your dreams should be or how and what you should dream or how many you’re supposed to have because you can have as many as you want. Right now we’re in a crisis, a pandemic and there are people suffering. People in hospitals dying of cancer who can’t see family, people worried about losing family members, people losing their jobs.

3. Another way to look at this crisis is to be grateful to God for giving us this lesson. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, instead I try to pick a theme for the year. This year, my theme is “gratitude”, so I am going to be grateful for everything, including the opportunities provided by this crisis. I’m grateful that my grandma is 93-years old and I still get to spend time with her and I make it a point to see her every month, not now during the crisis obviously, but knowing how old she is and how much she’s been through and she’s still here to tell me her amazing stories! I just feel like there is so much to be grateful for even now.

Here in the United States our lockdown is honestly kind of a joke. We’re not allowed to go to parks, or do outdoor activities, but we are allowed to go to the grocery store anytime we want. It’s a misdemeanor to visit friends, and the only people still working are essential workers, including medical staff but even in crisis, we are still buying stuff on Amazon and doing all these other normal things.

So, it’s really interesting how much we have to be grateful for in this country. I mean I’ve been to third world countries where the children don’t have parents or they’re sleeping on floors, on the ground in the dirt, not because it’s healthier or any of that other stuff, it’s because they don’t have money to eat and money to eat is more important than where they sleep and that’s a reality that is hard to see. There are other countries where their governments do not treat their citizens as well as ours does.

So, to really understand how good we have it and how amazing it is, is very important and to just take time to really be grateful for our lives and everything we have here. It’s just really a miracle and I do thank God for every chance that I get to make each day a great one!

I started by telling you about my near death experience and how it changed my life and how I looked at things and the same can be said for the current Covid-19 crisis. It’s changing my life, making me look at things differently and look for the bigger plan that God has for all of us.

I don’t judge it and I don’t say he’s doing it the wrong way; I just say okay. I’m grateful for all the lessons and everything that I get to learn about myself and this life.

Stay strong everybody and we’ll get through this.

Until next time.