Bob Schwartz

We have transformed the ways we live and work during the pandemic, like it or not. That forced transformation will be continuing for a while. In fact, it is now predicted that some of those changes, like work at home, will last long after they are needed for public health reasons.

There has also been talk about how this has transformed us personally, individually and in our relationships. There’s not much doubt that some of those changes involve psychological and emotional effects that are negative and unwelcome.

There is one more layer beneath all this. Pandemic or not, working at home or in the office, in touch in person or online, last March when it began or next March when it might be over, we are who we are, but more importantly, we can be who we can be. In the times, with all the outside transformations, we can be transformed inside. We can transform ourselves.

How? Why? In what ways? There are thousands of guides, from massive religious traditions to smaller philosophical and psychological practices to individual books and teachers.

This extreme moment, extreme in many ways, has given us an opportunity rarely seen. We can’t go back and we can’t stand still. So, paying the price of cataclysm, we might as well do a complete assessment of how things are and who we are. And make of it and ourselves what we can. It doesn’t look like it right now, but this might be paradise, if we are brave enough to be the ones who live there.