21/05/2020
FOUR PLACES YOU MUST GO DURING CRISIS
A life without challenges is a fruitless existence.
Yet during challenges, many people fritter away.
They postpone the proficiency that defines their being, the goodness that guides their hearts, and the love that should be at the center of their spirit.
The COVID-19 crisis revealed all that.
With lockdown, social distancing, quarantine, many people engaged in motion without direction, some went someplace irrelevant and some are stuck in standstillness.
But if there’s anything about a crisis, it’s a revelation of the roadmap of places we need to go, in fact, places we must go to move our life to the “next level”.
And the best four places to go during a crisis are:
👉Go Inward—Go deep within your spirit and meditate deeply. And prayerfully. This will help you understand the crisis better and reach deeper levels of your personality you never know existed. Going inward will help you to restore the balance you need to replenish your energies, to further develop your personal qualities. You need to go deep into solitude, stillness, and silence for contemplation so as to establish a proper relationship with the outer world. Robin Sharma said it best, ”through some dedicated work on your interior life, you can drive some extraordinary breakthroughs within your exterior life”
👉Go Outward—This entails engaging with one’s relations, family, friends, and society. Reach out to people, online and offline (at a socially accepted distance of course) circulate motivation, celebrate competence, listen more, give. Human life is founded on fellowship, reciprocity, and going beyond self-interest. Crisis is a time to go beyond self-interest and get involved in communal interest. As Nouwen writes, “real healing comes from realizing that your own particular pain is a share of humanity’s pain….Every time you can shift your attention away from the external situation that caused your pain and focus on the pain of humanity in which you participate, your suffering becomes easier to bear.”
👉Go Upward—This entails connection with divine power. No one has ever achieved anything great without a connection with a higher power. Crisis is a time for faith, a time for hope, a time for prayer. The focus is not just on worshipping a God above but on the silent perception of the spirit within. By going upward you'll come to experience this invisible power that made you and whose spirit pulses through every living being and is available to anyone with the awareness to detect it, helping them see the world in a more evolved and enlightened way, acting in a more lovely and humane way.
👉Go Downward—This is a time to go down into the humble nature that lies within your spirit which is all too often stifled by pride, ego-wars, and arrogance. Engage in correct self-assessment, reevaluate the values and principles you run your life by, reflect on your mortality, remember that life is ephemeral, life is infinite, life is fragile—this will humble and empower you simultaneously. As the dead Skeleton painting depicts, “Mihi Cras Tibi”—“Today it’s me, tomorrow is you”. Think about that! With this awareness, you operate on the principle that your existence as a human being is a calling to be a “proper shepherd of being” as Heidegger calls us and serves as a reminder of what’s most important to us.
I encourage—and challenge all those reading this to make the time, on a regular basis (not just in crisis), to go to these four places. And you will see your crisis become your conquests, your failures become your freedom, your crosses become your crown, your adversities become your advantages, your obstacles become your opportunities, your trials become your triumph and your hurts will become your heroic chef-d'oeuvre.
As for me and myself, the crisis has deepened my reflection on my instinct for leadership, my call to love and my ambition to serve.
(Sirpeter Aloh
And his existential metamorphosis, 2020)
