Excerpt from Seeking Balance in an Unbalanced Time (Greenebaum): Envisioning and Working for Our Future

 

Envisioning and Working for Our Future

The point of this brief concluding chapter is not to attempt to provide answers. Rather, things are so intense and so difficult right now that it can be hard even to think of the future. Yet with everything so upside down, I believe we have an important opportunity to consider what we want to see in the future. A “new normal” is going to come out of this. How do we want that to look? It’s, of course, very human for us to shrug and say, “This just isn’t the time for that.” But as Hillel would remind us, “If not now, when?”

There will be a new normal. There’s no disputing that. Do we simply want to stumble into it? Or do our children and their children deserve better? I have no children. But I care about yours. And I deeply believe they deserve a healthy “new normal”.

            So, what I’d ask of us now is for us to begin pondering some questions. Below are just a few that occur to me. What’s important are not these questions to the exclusion of others, but rather that we take the time, even now, to think of the future and to do what we can to enter that future with intent rather than simply by chance.

1.     As the pandemic recedes, what do we want the world to look like?

2.     Was the “old normal” so wonderful that we simply want to try to regain it? If not, what would we want changed?

3.     Are companies more important than the people who work there? If not, what would we want changed?

4.     With so many dying in nursing homes, do we need to rethink how we treat our seniors?

5.     Is the Climate Crisis something that we need to address? And if so, what should we be changing in how we live as we embrace our “new normal”?

There are so many other questions. These five are just intended to get the ball rolling. What I deeply believe is so very important is that we begin to think about our world “after the pandemic” so we might be more intentional about what that world looks like.

Finally, following this chapter is an Appendix that I hope the reader will find helpful. It includes some thoughts others have offered in difficult times that have been important to me in my life. It also includes some thoughts of my own that I have written over the past several years that helped me to focus.

Know that I wish you well. Know that you are important. Know that we all are family. Take care. We are in this together.

For more posts about Rev./Dr. Greenebaum and his books, click HERE.