What are the words of the quarantine? What are the words of a world in pause. I asked my community.
It's a Sunday in late February, it's raining outside, Kobe Bryant has been dead for a month, and suddenly the flow of my thoughts is torn apart by the news of the closures of all the schools in Lombardy: we are one week from Codogno, we are one week away. from the beginning of everything, in a few weeks the world paused. In those weeks I had put the podcast on standby and was recording the episodes of the second season. Bets imbued with change, motivation, and stimuli to become the best version of ourselves.
We then know what happened.
The world has paused.
They were weeks full of reflections, good intentions, pisses, trashed projects, pages of a book to write, and waiting. Waiting for what then?
I confess that I tried to pause, to wait, but I didn't. I continued to live carried away by the current. Didn't you really believe I was a personal growth jedi? I am human. And I get tired too. And I break. Comets. Like all.
So I thought about the words that marked the quarantine, and to do so I asked our community on Telegram for a hand, which I thank because they support me, or they tolerate me.
It depends on your point of view.
I put them in a row, like this ... but surely there will be more:
At the time of writing, Reflection is in the lead followed by Change,
My answer was Reflection, as if to mark a great harmony with my community.
If reflection must be, then I ask myself:
What have we meditated on? What thoughts did we have in our heads? We have been fine? Or were we afraid?
I am too much in the grinder to understand this moment. I have lived the last few years like a hamster running endlessly on a wheel, and I believed that this break was really healthy for my growth path: the first few weeks I was almost euphoric for this stop. I enjoyed my daughters, I enjoyed the breaths, I enjoyed the silence of the early morning without the hassle of the clock.
Then a strong annoyance took over: too many notifications, too many stupid messages, too many lives, too many webinars, too much of everything. In recent months there has been an absurd overexposure of content: in the same afternoon you could have a webinar with a great psychologist and at the same time a direct one from the Louvre for the preview of some shows. How do you keep up with everything?
I am too curious. I am an omnivore. I always like to know new things. The risk? Then to stop for a burnout principle.
But let's go back to reflection and change. I took the opportunity to write, even if I wrote less than I wanted; I took the opportunity to resume reading some books: I finished "The Magic Word" and "The Super Sense" by Paolo Borzacchiello, I finished reading "Digital Detox" by Alessio Carciofi. It is very difficult to make your aspirations for change coexist with everything that happens around you.
With hindsight I should have gone ahead with my goals without pausing them: my reflection was just that. I have allowed my thoughts to take over, and if you let your mind wander without putting it back on your priorities there is a risk that you will lose sight of them.
In any case, nothing is lost.
It won't be a few months to put my goals in the attic.
It will not be this pause that will put your personal growth in lockdown.
