Adopting an intentional lifestyle

Oasis

The second wave of Covid-19 has left us devastated and debilitated. Many children have been orphaned, several people have lost their loved ones and scores of the aged among us have breathed their last. The loss is irreplaceable and the grief immeasurable. Those affected will be scared for the rest of their lives. In the midst of this catastrophe, the collective goal of our nation should be to avert a third wave. This calls for all to adopt an intentional lifestyle, one that will be pandemic-appropriate and thus relevant to the current times.

Living intentionally during a pandemic entails embracing a lifestyle that restricts unnecessary outdoor activities, and while outdoors, following every protocol that is in place to prevent the spread of the virus. While it is common for us to crowd and throng in our dealings outdoors, we now have to espouse the concept of social distancing on a war footing. When I took the first jab of my vaccination three months ago at a neighbourhood hospital, I was aghast at the lack of social distancing at the venue. Though the hospital by all standards was upmarket and the crowd by every reasonable benchmark belonged to the educated and the cultured, there was crowding at the registration counters without maintaining any social distancing. It would have been an irony had there been an asymptomatic infected person— A super-spreader in a vaccination centre.

Before a predicted third wave, should our behaviour continue in our old fashion way, it is imperative that we adopt a lifestyle that will minimise our outings. We need to unlearn our old ways of crowding and learn new ways of living in a society. Our day-to-day lives should now be directed to be pandemic appropriate. As a society, we should adopt an intentional lifestyle with social distancing, sanitisation and masking up as a necessary part of our new lives.

In his best-seller The seven habits of highly effective people, author Stephen Covey highlights the second habit of successful people which he says is to “begin with an end in mind.” As Covid-19 is raging unabated let us begin with “the end in mind” and adopt an intentional lifestyle relevant for a pandemic.