Building future from home

By Clara López, member of the Baud team.

We are going to do the quarantine week and we begin to react on the strange and very serious situation that we are experiencing. A situation that, from our point of view, is not going to be a simple stoppage, but a before and after with consequences, some unfortunately, immensely sad.

A before and an after in which nothing will be the same.

Nobody knows how it will be, some of us will imagine details, but what we know with enough certainty is that it will be different.

Perhaps we have learned to use technology better, acquired new habits of hygiene or provision, we value more social moments, or moments with nature, perhaps we live a time of less trust and therefore less spending, we get hooked on Netflix or On the contrary, we abhor it, perhaps telework is encouraged more in companies, more distant, but more intimate at the same time - I myself have opened my house to others and I have entered the houses of colleagues, clients, or even famous journalists, politicians or athletes!

They can change so many things, no one will know which ones, but there will be a few.

We cannot predict it: we can help create it.

The future is not something unreal and distant, it is what we build today. What's new today will be normal tomorrow.

Today, in this crisis, we can choose between a proactive attitude, dynamic, constructive, that helps define the future, or a passive attitude, static, follower. Both are just as legitimate, but only one is exciting to us. We are creators and we are excited to continue creating in times of crisis.

We have been forced to be quiet at home, but our head, as long as the virus allows it, does not have to stop.

We have the capacity to research, learn, devise and design more than ever - and technology allows us to go very far in the process - to build a better future. Not the same as before; best. So this crisis has not been a brake but a propellant.

It is time to be analytical, sensitive, reflective, active, visionary, decisive, permanently flexible. It is time to use our best qualities as human beings: the ability to learn and adapt, and teamwork. As the prestigious social psychologist David Myers states: "evolution has prepared us to live creatively and adaptively in a changing environment." Let's take advantage of it.

Let's accept this crisis naturally and calmly, and let's start working together for a new social balance, better than the previous one., taking advantage of this global learning opportunity.

What can we do to be part of the group of the proactive?

Something very natural, very human, as the journal Nature suggested in an article published in 2013: accept, think and, above all, and sooner rather than later, act.

Take action to improve the situation today: propose activities, volunteer to help the most vulnerable, donate blood, clap at eight o'clock, share food, make masks, find the vaccine, follow the advice of the experts, stay home ...

In parallel, act to improve the future. And in this area, the ocean is vast and the possibilities endless.

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Image by Eduard Militaru.