If you Hivers out there watched Train to Busan I'd like you all to remember the character of Yong-suk. He was the selfish, rich CEO that seemed to only care about himself to the point that he was willing to bring everyone to the zombies so that he could live. In contrast to the other characters, it was easy to hate him. I can remember watching the film, imagining I was in his shoes and I asked myself out of the blue "If I were in the same life-and-death situation, will I react the same way as this guy did?"
Nobody planned for a pandemic to happen in 2020. Almost everyone on my timeline claimed at the beginning of the 2020 that it was going to be their year. Could be the jinx or some evil force of the world or maybe even humanity's sins have heard all of this wishful thinking and decided to make this year the worst for the majority. In the Philippines, to say that the situation is bad is an understatement. Public health, democracy, government, education and the economy are all going haywire. Future grandkids, you're going to have to pay for all of this. My generation failed you.
I witnessed first-hand how my good friends have taken the hit from the pandemic really hard. I have friends who were laid off from work, friends who were planning to resign but have to hold off because they have bills to pay, friends who have a covid + relative, a friend whose mom was exposed to covid + patients, a friend and a colleague who is a frontliner, a friend with mental health issues who lives alone, a friend who is closing businesses and a colleague who caught the virus and became covid + too.
At the beginning of the lockdown my grandma who was a smoker, got hit by a bad cough. It was so bad and she got hit by a fever as well. We were really scared and we thought it was covid. She had no other symptoms, just those. My mom managed to take care of my grandma, gave her meds, did the controversial "tuob" and I'm convinced that with her fighting spirit, she was able to recover. It wasn't covid, thankfully, because her body responded to the meds and the tuob.
With those, it's easy to picture how I'd lost my cool. I was always checking the news for updates and it was crazy how I was refreshing twitter every now and then just to get updates on the situation. Did I tell you that some guy blackmailed me? Yeah, that happened too. In the midst of a health crisis.
But I'm not saying all those so that I could get your sympathy and I know that a lot of people have it a lot worse than I did. I said all those because at that point of my life I thought that it was really easy to just think about myself and just not care. I could go Yong-suk and just throw everything away.
It was tempting, to be honest. Hahaha, but I didn't have it in me to do that. If humanity could go from hoarding toilet paper to growing plants... what's stopping me from picking myself up and becoming the better human in this situation?
I came up with four reminders to myself to carry me through the next disaster. God forbid it to be a zombie apocalypse! Let me know what you think in the comments section.
"Empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes," a friend said. I am grateful that my circle of friends practice this as we take turns in hearing each other out. We acknowledge that while we are different, we can walk in another's shoes and see things from their point of view. Doing this allows for us to hold off judgment, even if it's much more difficult to do so. When a friend comes clean to us and says she made a mistake, we validate her perspective and we hear her out.
One of the things that my friend really struggles with is sharing her problems because she thinks she's just being a burden to us. We reassure her that it's not true and that we are here for her.
It's very easy to judge and call people names because we only see the surface. We'll realize that this person was thinking from a valid place and maybe he just doesn't know how to express himself. This could lead to a misunderstanding. It takes more effort to understand and create a dialogue between people. But just because it's hard doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do.
To be a better human, it is not enough to empathize. A better human acknowledges the validity of the emotions and thoughts but does not stop there. A better human also calls out wrong behavior and practices.
"The intention is in the right place but the method is wrong," is something that I am hearing every so often now. There is such a thing as right and wrong. A good friend of mine, placed it so eloquently in a post of hers, just because something is valid doesn't mean it's right.
A simple example that she used to explain this point is getting angry at a delivery guy for sending in a package late. You getting angry is a valid response to the situation but what you do afterwards, like getting back at the delivery guy for your inconvenience is not right. Even if your anger was valid, your response is not automatically justified. The right thing to do, she said, is to ask the delivery guy the cause for delay. This dialogue could then pave the way for understanding, a nonviolent means to solve the problem.
My golden rule of helping out is always "make sure I have my life vest on first before I give life vests to everybody else." This is an airline rule as well. This may seem selfish to some, but there's actually sense in this.
If you save yourself first, you are ensuring that you will get to save a lot more people. If you chose to give your life vest to another person and sacrificed yourself, you would've only saved one.
Still, it amazes me how there are also people who would go out of their way to help other people. They don't only help when it's convenient to them, when they help, they give their whole heart. I myself have yet to practice that in my life. Who knows, when the situation will call for it, I could be as selfless too.
I am so blessed to be surrounded by friends that teach me how to be better everyday. Everyone in this situation has been coping in the best way they know how and I'm glad that humanity has been coping through planting. Things won't go back to normal because maybe, the normal then wasn't working anymore.
The virus is here to stay and it had affected humanity in a big way. It will continue shaping the new normal and ever the optimist that I am, I can wish that we would evolve for the better. Humanity may have its many flaws but I'm sure that we'd all come out of this pandemic stronger.
Keep planting!
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