COVID-19: Opening to a New Possibility — Michael Hamman
Like any disruption, COVID-19 is a phenomenon that invites us (perhaps, “forces” us) to shift our thinking in fundamental ways. The question is: how will we respond to the invitation? What is our psychological and emotional relationship to that invitation?
In workshops and coaching, I often teach the mindset shift from Predict-and-Plan to Sense-and-Respond. And yet, what this phenomenon called “COVID-19” reveals to me is how deep-seated my own way of thinking and being actually is grounded in a Predict-and-Plan orientation. I often profess that I operate from a Sense-and-Respond place. Yet, in fact, here I am, in the midst of this ultimate VUCA moment, waiting (hoping) for things to return to “normal” so I can get back to a comfortable equilibrium (equilibrium and equanimity are two entirely different things). A particular mood of dread and even terror grips me.
And yet, as I sit with this all—resting in the very dread and event terror of it—and as I allow a more expansive, more resourceful part of me to come online, a new possibility, a new opening comes into focus. It is as though a new image fades in, not so much overlaying the previous, more familiar image, but adding more color, more dimensionality. The once-familiar image becomes rendered as one I have never glimpsed before, an image that is far more wondrous and possibility-laden than that image in relation to which I have become habituated, even addicted to.
Even in the midst of the fear, a new sense of optimism and even a feeling of the kind of thrill that only comes about when we face a blank canvas comes online.
It is the possibility of living a life informed by, and oriented around, the profound recognition of what Buddhism has taught me for so many years: that the source of suffering is our attachment to the expectation of the predictability and immutability of life.
In extrapolating from that recognition, I ask: What if disruption and breakdown were the very source, not only of real creativity and innovation, but of the life-force that is the very essence of Cosmos, of ever-expanding (and evolving) universe? What if I could truly and really give up my addiction to predictability and certainty, and the groggy and even somewhat smug comfortableness into which that addiction lulls me. What if I could truly and really embrace the unknown, particularly as it shows up in the presence of disruption, of breakdown? What if I were to be truly open to a Sense-and-Respond way of being in the world?
And, finally, what if this were not merely an individual, personal inquiry. But one into which humanity itself is invited? What if COVID-19—as much a socio-economic-political phenomenon as it is a biological distinction—were an invitation to a new possibility for living, for humanity?
What could be our relationship to that invitation? To that possibility?