Coronavirus the peacemaker
The pandemic has made me think of a new normal we are headed to, a choice of living your life at peace with yourself
A friend of mine said to me the other day that while living through a pandemic is scary, he’s happy to be going through it as an adult, learning and observing on an intellectual level. Being able to witness and predict what a world post this looks like. And it got me wondering about how many of us have started to imagine a new world, a new way of life even if it’s an imagined future.
Have we all started making resolutions for when the pandemic is over? My biggest wish and one of the things I pray for mostly, for myself, is to always know, feel and exist in some sense of peace.
I am not always going to be able to engineer or curate the world around me, but I pray for peace to be able to go through whatever life throws at me. For example, are you happy at your workplace? I have heard so many cases of people who said they hadn’t known just how unhappy they were with the spaces they worked in, until the pandemic forced most people to work from home.
There has been reports from people in my close circle and people online who have woken up to how at peace they are, and just how much more they can get done now that they are a lot more peaceful. But there are other situations where people have always known that they should not be in. Situations where people have stayed in hopeless situations because sometimes the unknown can be just as scary. But if you look at this bloody pandemic, sometimes your journey into the unknown is not dependent on you.
When the hard lockdown started, I wrote a column on how to keep side relationships going through it. But that is when the lockdown was being punted as something that was going to last a few weeks. I remain shocked to this day at how many shares that particular column got in WhatsApp groups. The fact that people were so amused by it said to me that many people are in fact in those kinds of situations. Now I’m not one to judge, and God knows I have zero legs to stand on to judge people in extra-marital affairs. Men are usually very aggrieved with the contents of my column. It is male readers of this newspaper that have called me a “Los Panty”, because I dared to share an opinion they differed with.
After that particular column, those very men called me leadership and some who know me personally even called to thank me.
That column was meant to be light-hearted fun in the midst of the uncertainty that we were in. In my talking about imagining a different life post this pandemic and a life filled with peace we cannot ignore the shaky legs that most marriages rest on.
Behind every extra-marital affair, there is a spouse that is being cheated on, betrayed and whose life is possibly endangered by the things to which sex exposes one. There are those who are blissfully ignorant of the betrayals and may God carry on blessing their sweet little hearts. But there are also people who have had to confront on more than one occasion the hurt of being cheated on and all the selfdoubt it brings with it.
I have seen people wither away because of the hurt and damage that the betrayal has put them through. Is it not time to choose peace?
Is it not time for you, like people who have experienced peace from working at home, to discover what a new normal could be for you? I do not know who needs to hear this, but do you not owe yourself the chance to exist peacefully?