As pretty much everyone on the planet is aware of by now, the whole world is experiencing a pandemic with the COVID-19 coronavirus.
I’ve been watching, of course. With quite some interest, because my daughter is going to arrive into this world in 2 weeks and 3 days from now….
With the changes that have occurred just over the past few weeks, I’m wondering what the next few weeks is going to bring us.
I’ve watched as China locked down many of its cities, with rumours coming out of brutality and violence as they tried to control it. It looks like they succeeded, with only 3261 deaths at the time of writing, and no more infected or dying. They had less than 90,000 infected, with a 4% fatality rate.
And then there’s Italy now with a 9% fatality rate, equaling almost 5,000 dead so far.
Here in Australia, things are just starting to get ‘interesting’. People have been panicking already, and the whole world laughed at the Aussies panic-buying toilet paper…. until the rest of the world wondered if they should as well, and suddenly everyone was buying toilet paper.
Who needs food and water, right? Toilet paper is what will carry us through an apocolypse…
The country this past week has gone into lockdown, with all air travel suspended. We’ve become isolated from the rest of the world. And this next few days is going to see a total lockdown around the country, with non-essential businesses and services banned from being open. Everyone’s going to be working from home, if they can, or out of work if they can’t.
This is leading us into quite a recession as the entire social and economic system is being completely smashed.
I’m one of the lucky ones in all this. I’ve been working from home fulltime since July last year. And it was easy for me to be stricter with the social distancing this past month than it has been for a lot of others. My meetings have usuallly been via video conferencing, and now it’s always instead.
This is going to have a huge impact on our civilisation over the next few years. We’ll overcome this pandemic, and then we’ll find ourselves in a huge recession that will take a few years to get better.
And it will get better, things always get better. But we’re going to realise that things can be done differently.
More people will be working from home in future. Many businesses will no longer exist, but there will be new businesses taking advantage of a changed society, and a changed people. Many will suffer, as many always do through great social upheaval.
But from the ashes something else will come. Something that will be better than what we have had over the past few decades.
And it’s into this world that my daughter will be born.
This blog has been about my journey. For the past almost 9 years, my wife, Fanfan has joined me on this journey. Now Amelia, my daughter will be joining us too. This is going to be about our journey together.
And this post is my first at trying to capture a glimpse of this world right now. A glimpse that my daughter can read in the years to come. Not just to see the life that I’ve had up to this point, but to see what the world is like as she’s coming into it. To see her life from my eyes, as I write about it for future reference.
I’m excited by the opportunity for growth that this world is about to experience. And remember – many times in our personal lives and in the cycles of civilisation, our greatest growth always comes from the greatest pain.
Look after yourselves and your loved ones. You’ll get through this.
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