Glass half-full guru has point
YOU know the world is topsy-turvy when you start considering Tom Tate as your personal Zen master. Don’t judge.
Look, obviously the mayor is qualified as a civic leader, but until these dark days dawned I never considered him part of the Oprah ilk, doling out life advice and seizing upon “a-ha” moments.
But while he doesn’t quite have me jumping on couches, I have to give him credit for a coronavirus comment he made last week which has upended my own outlook.
Following the news that Tom Hanks tested positive for the virus while filming the Baz Luhrmann Elvis biopic on the Gold Coast, Cr Tate had a unique take on the shock diagnosis.
“Now everyone in New York knows we have the biopic movie Elvis being filmed on the Gold Coast starring Tom Hanks,” he said. “Before that, it was probably not even newsworthy and under the radar.
“Now everyone’s going ‘oh, Gold Coast is an epicentre of filming in Australia’. I always look at it as a glass half full.”
He’s right. And right now, we all need to be half-full kind of people.
I know it’s hard to see past food shortages, toilet paper wars and a tanking economy, but there is a bright side to this global pandemic – and if we are going to not just survive but thrive, we need to focus on it.
Yes, the thought of being stuck at home for weeks on end makes my anxiety spike, but maybe this is just what the doctor ordered.
After all, how often do we complain about the speed that life keeps happening to us? There is rarely a minute, let alone weeks, to stop and smell the roses (even if through a face mask).
It’s like we’re all about to embark on a meditation retreat, if we use this time to focus on our families and even contemplate our own lives, we might find some real and lasting positive change on the other side.
Perhaps it’s presumptuous, but I feel I speak with some authority on this matter.
Between the years of 2007 and 2010 I was all but housebound thanks to a newborn, followed by a year of exclusive breastfeeding (not my fault, he absolutely refused any and all bottles), followed by a new pregnancy and yet another year of breastfeeding.
Despite losing my income during this period, I don’t think we have ever saved so much money – I wore the same maternity-ish clothes and we went nowhere.
But more than that cash in the bank, what I really earned was a sense of the value in slowing down.
Where I used to do 50 things in a day, I did one. While I was bound to the sleep-and-feed schedule of babies, I spent time thinking about how I wanted my life to look when my boobs and I were free again.
I took walks, I spent hours on the phone chatting to friends, I played Tetris and I read books. And when it was all over, I didn’t feel a shadow of my former self, I felt more truly myself.
And I’m in esteemed company when it comes to experiencing the positive effects of a life break; no less than Sir Isaac Newton experienced his own annus mirabilis, or “year of wonders”, during self-isolation.
In 1665, an outbreak of plague closed the Cambridge colleges, meaning Newton had to return home to Lincolnshire. While there, free to think and shape his own ideas about the universe, he casually created calculus and chilled under an apple tree … where he discovered gravity.
Which is yet another parallel between Newton and myself – after all, my boobs also discovered gravity after my years of self-isolation.
Look, I know we are facing a serious and scary chapter in the history of the world right now. But we can write ourselves a better, brighter future from here if we focus on the positives.
I know there are a thousand reasons why this crisis is bad news – but there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s here, it’s happening, the only thing we can control is our mindset.
Working from home, flexible hours, stronger family and community connections, all can be a part of this half-full future. Just ask Guru Tom.
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