Making best use of Covid times

If difficult stretches of time throw us a challenge and make us think and behave differently, they also often emerge as life’s best teachers. While the tone is of fear, gloom and lament on most lips nowadays, few are using this period as an opportunity to turn things completely around.

Many are going back into reviving their long-lost hobbies. The social media is throbbing with people displaying their musical talents, either rendering solo songs or getting together with other musicians on “tele” platforms to create complex music. In one of the displays, several musicians joined in from different parts of the globe to create a finelytuned “orchestra”!

There are others who are reverting to dancing, cooking, craftsmanship, yoga or fitness. All of them look surprisingly happy in the videos they post, their pursuits proving helpful in lifting their gloom and bringing a smile of accomplishment and joy onto their faces.

Few seem to be discovering and enjoying their new avatar in “preaching”! Yes, before lockdown, there were just a handful of the popular “spiritual leaders” discoursing on FB. Now I see too many, from friends, industrialists to shop owners, who seem to have achieved “awakening” and metamorphosed into Covid time preachers!

I am not being sardonic or trying to put them down. There comes a time in a person’s life which he takes as an opportunity to look “in”, especially now that the “out” is all sealed and locked! I sometimes marvel at how this person, who ate, drank and made all the money has suddenly started delivering sermons! Some of them are not bad but I wish they would make them shorter…now that there are so many to listen to by each of us!

One of my interesting and gratifying experience was a video consult I did with a 32year-old mother of two, sometime in April, barely two weeks into the lockdown. She had “lots” of GI issues…of turbulent gases, angry bowels and poor digestion. Her face wore a frown that bordered on a scowl, and the forehead was uneven with deep furrows.

After listening to all her problems, aggravated also by the company of two “hyperactive” children and a weighty husband all the time, I gingerly suggested if she would be willing to try an unusual prescription. One was to enroll in a free on-line course of “happiness” (offered by Yale University) and the other was to stand in from of the mirror 5 times a day and smoothen out her brow with a soft smile.

She called last week to thank me…she has discovered how to beat her blues and learnt to enjoy the company of her children, who in fact told her that she has started looking pretty! And she is willing to preach these simple tricks to many who are suffering like she was.

Made my day!