By Clara López, member of the Baud team.
We are going to make the quarantine week and start reacting to the strange and very serious situation we are living. A situation that, from our point of view, is not going to be a simple stop, but a before and after with consequences, some of them, unfortunately, immensely sad.
A before and after in which nothing will be the same.
No one knows what it will be like, some of us will imagine details, but what we know with a fair amount of certainty is that it will be different.
Perhaps we have learned to make better use of technology, acquired new habits of hygiene or provision, we value more social moments, or moments with nature, perhaps we live in an era of less trust and therefore less spending, we get hooked on Netflix or on the contrary, we abhor it, perhaps in companies teleworking is encouraged more, more distant, but more intimate at the same time - I myself have opened my home to others and I have gone into the homes of colleagues, customers, or even famous journalists, politicians or athletes!
So many things may change, no one will know which ones, but they will be a few.
We can't predict it: we can help create it.
The future is not something unreal and distant, it is what we build today. What is new today will be the norm tomorrow.
Today, in this crisis, we can choose between a proactive attitudedynamic, constructive, that helps to define the future, or a passive attitudestatic, of follower. Both are equally legitimate, but for us only one is exciting. We are creators and we are excited to continue creating in times of crisis.
We have been forced to stay still at home, but our head, as long as the virus allows it, does not have to stop.
We have the ability to research, learn, devise and design more than ever before - and technology allows us to get very far in the process - to build a better future. Not the same as before, but better. So that 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 renowned social psychologist David Myers says: "Evolution has prepared us to live creatively and adaptively in a changing environment. Let's take advantage of it.
Let us accept this crisis naturally and calmly, and start working together for a new social equilibrium, better than the previous one.taking advantage of this global learning opportunity.
What can we do to be part of the proactive group?
Something very natural, very human, as Nature magazine already suggested in an article published in 2013: accept, think and, above all, sooner rather than later, act.
Act to improve the situation today: propose activities, volunteer to help the most vulnerable, donate blood, clap at eight o'clock, share food, make masks, look for the vaccine, follow the instructions of the experts, stay at home...
In parallel, act to improve the future. And in this area, the ocean is vast and the possibilities are endless.