Today for Tomorrow

?“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” - Saint-Exupéry

What a fantastic lesson in humility we are receiving today. We thought we had mastered and domesticated everything. Yet, we find ourselves powerless in the face of “almost nothing”; and we realize that we’ve become prisoners of our own world.

On March 9, 2003, Paolo Coelho wrote a letter to President Bush “thanking” him for invading Iraq. This is what inspired this text. Like Coelho's, this letter is not intended for those on the front line, those who are sick, those who are actively fighting Covid19 and to whom I would like to send all my positive energy. It is for those of us who are in lockdown.

It’s a bitter and even painful thank you that I want to share today, but also a thank you full of hope.

Thank you for allowing us to rediscover the richness of family relationships, for giving us time to talk with our spouses, our children and our parents. Thank you for giving us time to reconnect with those we love but never had time to call. Thank you for allowing us to discover that our neighbors are also good people. With them, we have learnt how to say thank you in a thousand ways.

Thank you for teaching us again to wait, to appreciate, to deeply desire, and to finally be fully present here and now for what and who matters. Before, we were restless, obsessed with action, by a frenzy which, paradoxically, made us passive. Today, we learn to be active by "doing nothing", to do only what is essential, what is decisive, what makes us grow. We learn silence, this silence that we fill with our self-transformation.

Thank you for allowing us to discover the inner peace that is not the stillness that we are being asked for, which is just one more inner turmoil. No, that peace gives us self-confidence. Thank you for letting us reconnect with our desire—“the impetus of life which carries forward, which often surprises, which always liberates and which reveals the meaning of being"—and for letting it express itself.

Today, we see the world as it is, beautiful when we let it live, beautiful in its diversity, its colors, its sounds, its birdsongs, its smells and tastes. Thank you for allowing us to tame the silence, to make it a friend and to discover, like newborn babies, the amazing sound of life. We feel the roughness of a tree bark, the lightness of a fabric, the coldness of a metal, the softness of a cushion. We learn again the scent of Spring at dawn, the freshness of twilight, the flavors of foods.

Thank you for putting the Hippocratic Oath at the center of medicine, for restoring their true value to caregivers who show every day that you can do a job with faith, humility and absolute dedication. Thank you for giving back credit to the forgotten—garbage collectors, postmen, teachers, delivery people, cashiers, cleaning staff, small traders, etc...—who make it possible for life to go on. Thank you for giving a little more meaning to our lives by allowing thousands of us to be useful to the weakest, thus illustrating the greatness that can exist in Humankind.

Thank you for reminding us that there is only one humanity, that we are all brothers and sisters, linked to each other and that when we help others, we are also helping ourselves. Thank you for showing us that by self-isolating to protect our parents, we also protect our Mother Earth.

Thank you for reminding us that disease has no borders whether borders have walls or not, that health is much more precious than gold coins and that our power is only an illusion. So, we must cooperate among nations in order to regain our freedom and thus give globalization a new meaning.

Thank you for letting us discover how transcending our fears can move us from the Darkness to the Light. Thank you for giving us this precious time to discover who we really are, and who we really want to be.

But will we be able to build together the world we want?

It is today that we are building the world of tomorrow. It’s what we do today that determines what we will be tomorrow. It is the future which determines the present and not the reverse.

So, what are you going to do now to make tomorrow the way you want it to be?

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 "Do you want a better, more brotherly, more just world? Well, start doing it. Do it in you and around you. Make it small, and it will grow. " - Carl Gustav Jung