Brendan & Lori O'Gara

I can’t be the only one who sees some silver in the lining of this cloud we are living in. This step back from life has given humans a pause to consider what is really important. They are looking at the necessary things and deciding what they can live without. We are all realizing what is preciouse to us. Let’s do a bit more.

Can we take this time to go back to some simple things?

Let’s send letters sometimes instead of a texting that good news we want to share? Letter writing is a dead art. It really only takes a few minutes. Instead of ignoring that neighbor across the street, mabey wave and say “Hi”? Let’s use more personable ways to reconnect.

Let’s bake bread once in a while, cook more meals at home and have more dinner parties. Let’s do more face to face instead of video chats when life resumes it’s simi normal state. Let’s go easy on our kids when they say they are tired of all the extra curricular activities and rigid schedules. Let’s let them be children a little longer. Let’s focus on people not things.

Let’s go and spend time with our elders who survive this plage and listen to their stories of a simpler time. Then let’s try to bring some of that simple back home with us. Let’s teach our kids and friends that heritage is worth preserving.

I am not suggesting that the completely dispose of our modern conveniences or technology. I am pleading for our society to look at how distanced we already were before the mandated social distancing. We sit on trains, stand in lines and do not speak. We ignore each other with our faces on screens.

I am suggesting we reconsider our values. I am asking that we look at all the impulse buying that we did because of being manipulated by media, mostly on the devices we say make our life easier. Let’s get serious about what we need to live and look at all useless things we purchase. Why do we wonder where our money went at the end of the week?

Our lifestyle if different than even what it was even twenty years ago. Maybe we need to look at what is really worth it and what is not. I don’t know about you but this crisis has really brought it to my forethought that we are not prepared to take care of ourselves. We are a service based society and we have come to depend of services for all our survival needs. We will be dead if our infrastructures fail us.

Let’s not waste this lesson we have been given. Let us be brave and make some radical changes to how we live.