A few years ago, my sister, C, gave me a calendar as a Christmas gift. One of those that you can use forever. And, as luck would have it, I forget its wisdom every year so, I am enlightened continuously. đŸ™‚
I lack inspiration this morning. And whenever that happens I turn to the world around me (granted I should do that more often). And this morning my calendar says:
We see things this way: we are all in the same boat, traveling through time. If one of us lights a fire in his side of the boat and another one starts pouring water in the boat, we will all be hurt. And it is the responsibility of each passenger to make sure the boat is not destroyed. Our planet travels through time as a boat
Ailton Krenak, Representative of the Indigenous Population of the Amazon
Where do we even start seeing the wisdom of this? Looking at the work of Mr. Krenak, I can guess he is talking about how fast we are approaching the end of what our amazing planet has to offer so that we can live. Scary and true!
If we however look at this at a micro level, we can apply this wisdom to every single walk of life when we are supposed to work as a team. In our families, in our work teams, in our efforts to beat this century’s pandemic (or should I say first pandemic?)
In my post last week I was talking about how there is no greater sabotage than the one that happens to us from within. This is valid for each and every one of us and for each and every one of the teams we are part of. If we are not pulling in the same direction, in the best of cases we will simply stay put, make no progress.
This week, in many instances I was told that this pandemic is in fact a political and economic game, that there is in fact no such deadly virus, that we should just go about our business in the same way we did before because, at worst, this is a common cold. And I realised with much sadness that some of us are pouring water into the boat, some of us are making a fire and some of us are simply sleeping. And we aren’t even in the same boat, we are just in the same storm (well put, Greta Thunberg!).
We are in the middle of a universal exercise of “how to get into the same boat and make sure you row successfully”. So far, there are still millions in the water and the ones in the boat are simply making it spin faster and faster. I wonder what it would take (if a pandemic isn’t doing it) to get us to row together. And I also hope that when that happens, we aren’t that close to the rapids that nothing more can be done.
Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash
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