Lockdown the ultimate time to rethink your life

Lockdown probably in more than one ways, makes you want to escape. Suddenly you know how it feels to be caged, imprisoned and deprived of freedom. For the first time in your life, you have plenty of time to kill and your thoughts are all going around one thing: Covid19 and how the world will change.

Rethink your life

Instead of focussing on how the world will change, and how many death this virus takes, or following conspiracy theories on the internet, you might want to use this time to rethink your own life. First of all, how the world is going to change is not up to you entirely, for like with the lockdown the governments and rulers of the world like the big industries and banks, will decide for you how society you can participate in might look.

In the Netherlands, for example, they are designing the 1.5-meter society, believe me, or not, it might become the new lifestyle worldwide. There is no resisting it, it will be mandatory, with punishment to follow if you break it, same with the mandatory face masks we probably have to wear for a long, long time…….especially in the wealthy rich Western countries where they are scared as hell that the economy will not survive if this lockdown endures longer.

Those are obligations you cannot influence no matter how fast your fingers type your tweets or how many upset Facebook posts you publish publicly. It will happen, no matter what.

But what you can do, instead of worrying about this, is focussing on your own position in this new society they are creating for us under the fear of a virus.

And you might want to take three things into consideration when re-thinking your life:

How happy was I before the lockdown?
How do I experience this pandemic and all the new developments in my society?
And what do I want for myself for the future keeping those previous 2 points in mind?

Homeland and safety

I know expats that moved mountains to get home before the lockdown had them stuck. They felt that only their home country could keep them safe. Some are now on lockdown for over 34 days in countries where there are high death tolls and not enough medical equipment to deal with the sick. Are they really safer in their home country then they were in their guest country?

Others stayed or had to stay because there were no more flights home. And they sit is out, discovering that maybe having to stay abroad wasn’t as bad as they thought it would be since their guest country is handling the pandemic better or there aren’t as many sick in their guest country.

Feeling safe is an emotional state of mind, where one feels safe in something familiar, others can overcome that and do not feel unsafe under any circumstances.
And sometimes you have to deal with matters to feel safe again, face the dragon so to speak.

Let’s be honest: haven’t you felt a little scared or concerned with Sars-CoV2 lurking everywhere.

Safety is about your mental toolkit, can you handle situations, and where I am no Indiana Jones, I do not scare easily. Although I must confess that with fear almost touchable jumping out the social media to grab your mind, I had my weak moments. Being in a country that is relatively new to me, it is hard to keep track of the facts and stay on top of relevant news.

But I feel saver here in Mexico than I would be in the Netherlands, where the death toll is so much higher.

Crossing mental borders

Let’s play a game shall we:

Close your eyes
Let’s escape reality for a moment and fantasize
Picture yourself in a dream location
How does that look like, describe it to yourself?|
How does being there make you feel?

Are you smiling right now? I bet you are. Even without closing your eyes, the thought alone of a being in a perfect dream place makes you feel good.

Would it not be amazing is life could be like that always? If life makes you smile all day, every day?

Our times of self-confinement or reclusive life, mandatory or not, allow us inner journeys. We dream. Some people dream little other people dream big. We dream to escape, to relax our emotions and brains. It is a coping mechanism every human being needs. OUr dreams are our hope, our escape room reversed.