It’s 2060, and I’m 59 years old. I’m living an average, yet satisfying, life —or maybe I’m a retired groupie, who knows. I look back at the events, people, relationships that shaped the course of my life, and I remember 2020. Sometimes it’s useful to take a step back, stop and look how far we’ve come: life’s a blur, and we often realize too late that time has already stolen our most precious moments. I was 19 years old, stuck in quarantine for months, heartbroken — my boyfriend left me while stuck in each others’ homes, 300km apart—, and in solitude. At the time it felt like a very big deal: no friends to cry with, or even to talk with, and endless messy information about the pandemic statistics and the future measures. I remember the fear of not being able to live my everyday life in the same way ever again. I laugh at my own thoughts — I was still very young, and I particularly suffered from being kept at home. I was frightened by being alone. Not romantically, I was afraid of growing up without the people I leaned on, the people I loved, that I wanted to keep in my life for the long run. I was blown away by the fact that you could really pour all of yourself into a person you believe in, only to realize they don’t share the same view. And I grew inevitably a big fear of losing the people I loved for the same reason as my boyfriend: a misunderstanding in weighing each other’s value. I remember thinking — “This is freaking dangerous. How am I supposed to prevent people from taking advantage of my empathy, or trust, for their own good? How can a person show a good side being ROTTEN and unresolved inside? And why do people like this not take advantage of the healthy environment they’re put in to thrive, work on themselves, recognize that they’ve been doing it all wrong and become better?”. I wasn’t that naive of a person, so the “betrayal” I felt sounded different. I think about the life I live now: everything changes. I’m happy. In these forty years I have seen the growth of a magnificent thing: the power of connection. It was a new born in the Covid-19/heartbreak times, and now it’s better than ever. People realized that we need each other’s help. Without asking for it. Because often we’re too busy drowning in our own despair to reach out. Throughout social media, craftsmen, workmen, restaurateurs, all kinds of sellers began to lift each other’s activities up, and to promote them, during that period of crisis. My friends reached out to me as soon as they heard something was wrong. And they dealt with me until I felt better, even though I was a dead weight. Now, service to others is a daily basis. I’m not afraid of asking a neighbor to help me fix something. I’m happy to keep a friend of mine’s cousin’s dog for the day if it means that I have made their day a little bit nicer.

It’s all about service. Quoting Rachel Naomi Remen, “Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul. Serving is different from helping. Helping is not a relationship between equals. A helper may see others as weaker than they are, needier than they are, and people often feel this inequality. But when we serve, we don’t serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves, and we draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve; our wounds serve; even our darkness can serve. My pain is the source of my compassion; my woundedness is the key to my empathy. Serving makes us aware of our wholeness and its power. Service is a relationship between equals: our service strengthens us as well as others. Fixing and helping are draining, and over time we may burn out, but service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will renew us. In helping we may find a sense of satisfaction; in serving we find a sense of gratitude.” This is the greatest revolution ever. You want to know what inspires me? Kind people. Because I’ve come to terms with the fact that giving everything to the other is never a waste: we can always inspire other people to do and be better, even if they don’t treat us right. Kind people never take it personal, because they know it’s not about them. And that’s why I was wrong: I made it about me, I was the only person in the world suffering, and I thought that I wasted my time on someone that didn’t make anything out of it. Some people, like me, just take some time to realize it. Great job 2020 kids.

Image: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) - Quinn Dombrowski