Monday, March 23, 2020

BREATHE DEEP | Improve-the-World Opportunities

As we practice social distancing, all of us who remain healthy can help ourselves and others by taking a moment to breathe deep and appreciate the love and joy we share, if remotely. Toward that end, we’re scheduling posts that uplift, guide, and unite us in these difficult times.

This comes from Stephen Dinan at The Shift Network:

"Get involved in improve-the-world opportunities that this extended break from business-as-usual will provide. The more you focus on the opportunities, the more you unleash your creativity and focus on the positives. Some things that the pandemic may push us into that will help us in the long haul:
  1. Creation of stronger and more resilient local networks, which prepare us for other disasters as well as giving us more connections in our community.
  2. Virtualization of work. Telecommuting will force more people to get creative in how we engage our work and spend less of our time commuting in the future. This will help to reduce our carbon footprint, which is important to address climate change.
  3. Source more food locally, and energy too.
  4. Reduce dependency on the global supply chain so we don’t buy nearly as many goods that are made on the other side of the planet.
  5. Shift from over-consumption to a more experiential and relational life.
  6. Deepen your personal growth practices and your ability to be calm in a tempest. This cultivates your capacity for more conscious leadership
  7. Identify emerging leaders in the community who can be nominated or recruited into future political roles, raising the caliber of our political leadership on the other side of this.
  8. Focus on what unites us rather than what divides us, even in a contentious election season (which will move mostly online). The pandemic can help us cross political divides as we work on shared solutions to community challenges.
  9. Cross-generational collaboration: since this will strike elderly populations hardest and the youth the least, it can activate more cross-generational relationships, which can help us in addressing other societal issues as well.
  10. New kinds of entrepreneurial ideas and visionary solutions will emerge. New businesses will be born. Necessity is the Mother of Invention and crises force innovative thinking. What could you incubate in this time of crisis that will demonstrate real value in the time after?
  11. This can lead more people to the recognition that we truly are one interconnected human family now and that we can only solve our challenges when we work together. In essence, this crisis can propel us into more of a sense of global solidarity and citizenship, which is the hallmark of the next stage of evolution."