“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
― Edmund Burke
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte
Trying to predict the future from the past isn’t easy, but in all honesty it is all that we have. If something hasn’t happened yet, we have no frame from which to judge it, to compartmentalize it, and to make it unfold in an expected way.
That’s why people fought to the death over their belief that the earth was flat, and why wars continue over centuries in an effort to defend beliefs from long ago. It feels safer to cling to what we know rather than to wander into the world of the unknown.
Right now we are dealing with a pandemic. It’s not that these are unprecedented times – this has happened before, but the majority of us weren’t alive for it. The Spanish flu of 1918 provides many valuable opportunities to learn from because it was recent enough that there are recorded facts about it. There were numbers, pictures, and conclusions drawn after it was over that could serve useful today.
Only they aren’t convenient. They aren’t what we want to hear. They take away from how we want this to go, what our own expectations are that would allow us to return to what we consider to be normal. Even if your life wasn’t great before all of this happened, at least you woke up every day knowing what you were facing.
Now even that is gone.
This article from CBC details the deadly second wave of the virus that overall killed 50 million people, and it is thought provoking and well worth a read. It isn’t necessarily a true representation of how things may play out and what we should consider doing, but it’s something to consider.
Going Backwards – As of today, Pluto, Saturn, Venus and Jupiter will all be in retrograde. If you aren’t big on astrology, all that means is that from the perspective of the earth, these planets appear to be stationary or traveling backwards. Astrologers have been saying that 2020 was going to be an intense year. So far, so right. From the article It’s the Most Intense Astrological Week of the Year from The Cut by Claire Comstock-Gay: “First, when so many planetary events happen in such a short amount of time, it’s bound to feel intense, exhausting, even a little wacky. Change of any kind tends to be tiring, and right now, we’re being asked to process many types of changes at once.”
Just be okay with taking things slowly right now. We are all feeling our way through the dark and some days are going to be more challenging than others.
Thought of the Day – This is a great time to learn something new. Whether it is a different language or a skill that you could turn into a business, with everything happening at the moment it is an ideal time to throw yourself into something that fascinates you. As everything around us is in a state of flux, it feels appropriate to reinvent who we are into who we have always wanted to be.
Have a beautiful day.
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”
― Aldous Huxley