Good morning! I hope your day is off to a great start.
It’s hard to believe the month is half over and Christmas is just over a week away. It seems we missed something this year. I think it’s all the holiday goodies people put on file cabinets in the office that I always sampled several times every day. It’s a convenient excuse for the traditional holiday weight gain. This year I got fat all on my own. Go figure.
Working from home isn’t something most of us ever really thought we’d see, at least on this scale. Some companies were warming up to the idea, partly due to a shortage of qualified workers in some career fields. A year ago, they were begging people to come to work. Then somebody sneezed, and now they’re begging us to stay home.
Our world is changing. Even before the pandemic, companies were beginning to offer “alternate work arrangements.” Stores were offering personal shopping service with curbside pickup. And people who couldn’t figure out the TV remote were ordering products and having them delivered right to their door. I think my granddaughter was one of them. She’s six.
Malls have been shutting down and stores are looking more like warehouses. Drones deliver products, taxis drive themselves, and robots are flipping hamburgers. All of these things were in the works before Coronavirus. But what was once considered innovative is now a matter of necessity. And we’re powerless to stop it. The best we can do is hop on and enjoy the ride.
There are two kinds of thrill rides – the kind where you see what’s coming, and the kind where you’re in the dark, getting jerked around in every direction. The ride we’re on is a little of both. You don’t know everything that’s coming, but you’ve been through enough twists and turns to know what to expect. And then there are the bumper cars. They throw them in just for fun.
We may not know what to expect as we leave the station, but we know what awaits at the end. It looks pretty much the same as when we got on. Only now, we’re filled with the exhilaration of actually surviving the ride. Hopefully we’re still filled with the original contents of our stomach, but sometimes that’s part of the fun, too. “It was awesome! I almost puked!!!”
I think a lot of us have experienced that queasy feeling all through this year. We keep thinking sooner or later this will pass and things will get back to normal. Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but things will never be the same as they were. Yes, this will pass, and we’ll be better able to handle the next crisis. But most of the changes we’ve made this year will never go back.
That doesn’t mean life will never be good again. Just that it’ll never be quite the same. And it’s what we make of those changes that will determine whether we come out on top or further behind. In 1986, when Microsoft issued its first public offering of stocks, computers were still an extravagance for quirky nerds. Yet, look at us now. Can you even imagine life without one?
Had you bought into the “craze” back then, you could have gotten shares of Microsoft for $21. A single share of that stock bought back then would be worth $33,600 today. All told, more than 12,000 people became millionaires, simply because they embraced change and believed in a geek.
And here’s the point – whether you believed in 1986 that computers would someday be part of our everyday lives doesn’t change the fact that they are. We can complain all day about a simpler time when people knew how to read maps and have fun without technology. And how do we share that message? We blast it out all over the internet. Duh!!!
You see, when change occurs, we play along whether we want to or not. When a tsunami strikes, we rebuild – we just build a little higher this time. When stores close, we shop online. And when industries collapse, we learn a new skill. We adapt. Life goes on.
Our world is changing, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Some of those changes are like gentle waves, and others come crashing in like a tsunami. But much like that rollercoaster, we know how the ride ends – we step off and move on to the next adventure.
We can cope with change or grow with it. One leaves you struggling for air, and the other will set you on a mountaintop. We may not be able to control the circumstances, but we can control our response to them. The ocean floor is littered with ships that tried to plow through the waves, but the smallest of boats made it safely across by simply riding on top of them.
That’s all for now. Have an awesome day!
© 2020 Dave Glardon – All rights reserved
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