Emerge From the Pandemic With Renewed Purpose

Source: Randalyn Hill/Unsplash

Over dinner recently, my son really shook me up. He’s always been passionate about UK politics, but out of the blue, he asked, "Dad is India actually the place where we could be making a bigger difference? Could we consider as a family just moving there?"

Lots of content has rightly been written about the psychological costs of lockdown, but it has also given many of us the space to ask more profound questions about what we want from the next phase of our lives.

And I’m not just talking about deciding to work at home a few days a week—I’m talking about fundamentally re-aligning our lives for a greater sense of meaning and purpose.

Many of us have heard the success stories: the banker who has packed it in to become a baker, the friend who has moved from the city to the wild, or even the woman who gave up marketing to start a sex toy boutique. Whether the change involves physically relocating, changing jobs, or starting your own business or a new relationship, those who have been bold enough to take these risks seem to be widely celebrated and satisfied.

Lockdown has provided the optimal conditions for life changes.

Neuroscientists argue that shocks or jolts are often what we need to break our old habits and their associated, well-trodden neural pathways, whilst psychologists suggest that starting new habits after a break or pause is the best way to effectively reset.

The risk for many of us, however, is that we will miss this window of opportunity and fail to rewire, snapping back into the comfortable neurocircuitry of our old routines instead.

At the risk of sounding like a cliché psychologist telling you to talk about your feelings, I believe that the best way to avoid this neurological auto-piloting is to discuss the following questions with somebody who knows you well:

• What have you learned during the pandemic about what is important to you?
• How do you want to spend the precious time you have in the next stage of your life?
• What will you regret if you don’t change now?

While for me, this conversation was sparked by a comment from my young son, I think that it is equally valuable to look to the wisdom and experience of the older generation.

I recently came across some surveys of retired people, asking what their main regrets were looking back on their lives. Nearly a quarter of respondents in one U.S. survey said that they wished they had taken more risks, while almost half regretted not pursuing their dreams.

One of the biggest regrets people had was living their lives too rigidly according to social expectations. In this vein, I would urge everyone not to simply stick to the tramlines but to step back and question: Where am I going? Why am I following this path?

So, this week, book a space in your diary to sit down with someone and ask these key questions. Then, if you snap back to your old patterns, at least it’s a conscious choice.

Studying human nature, my guess would be that most of us will make few significant changes. But there may well be a precious courageous few who choose to seize this moment rather than let it drift away.