Once upon a time, back when humans were allowed to travel, I went on a road trip from Munich to Florence and found myself spending the night at a friend’s place in a little town in Tuscany.
After a lovely dinner of pasta cooked with the freshest, most succulent tomatoes imaginable, and several bottles of Chianti, my host, a Romanian working in the then-flourishing gig tech economy in Europe, asked me, “Want to have a tarot card reading?”
I’d never done a tarot card reading before and I was curious. I grew up with fortune telling, my father was a big believer. At six months old, each of us (my two siblings and I) had our fortunes read and I wasn’t told the reading till the day I left home. (But that’s another story).
Back to that little house in Tuscany …
At one point in the reading, Roswit said to me, the next two cards will determine who you are and who you really want to be. And I picked The Princess Warrior card, followed by The Hermit. She looked at me and said, “You are very conflicted. You are a Princess Warrior but you really want to be a hermit.”
The reason this memory has returned to me at this moment is because, over the last two weeks of voluntary Stay-Home and now that Singapore has further tightened its restrictions on going out, I have found myself vacillating between my innate desire to be a hermit and my instinct to fight.
One moment I am saying to myself, maybe I should just take the year off, retreat into my cave and do what I’ve always wanted to do (obviously not travel anymore because I can’t) and the next I am saying, but there’s so much to do and as painful as it is, I want to be taking an active part in this extraordinary moment in history.
This moment calls to me as a journalist. This is how I am wired, and this is what I was trained for. How can I back away?
In one of my first reporting gigs as a crime journalist, I was called to a scene of a fire where an entire family had lost their home and I stupidly asked the crying mother how she felt. She screamed at me. Looking back, I would have screamed at me too. I lacked compassion, I only wanted the soundbite.
This crisis needs us to approach it with a lot of compassion and empathy. It demands that all of us fight and do what we can in our little corners to make it a little better for someone or everyone, whether it’s now or after, when that after comes.
I was so pleased that after our WiT Virtual event on Wednesday, Tushan Shanmugarajah of Findmyfare in Sri Lanka, who listened in, wanted to share how he managed to save jobs through creative thinking on his part – and I immediately had to write it up in this article.
As business journalists, these are the stories worth writing about and sharing. And if you have similar stories to share, please reach out.
Anyway, back to that little house in Tuscany …
To be honest, solitude is my preferred state. I’ve worked from home most of my career. When I was offered an editor’s position in Hong Kong, my condition was that I be allowed to work from home. When the same company offered me a transfer to Singapore to take over the group editorial position, I said I’d run it from Hong Kong. I like remote work. I like social or physical distancing, before it became a thing.
So I have no issues with remote work which seems to be causing so much angst in the world. But I get it. Even for those with inner hermits in us, there is still a need to be connected – as can be seen by the explosions in social interaction we are seeing worldwide.
For the first time in living history, all of us are grounded. Most are locked down at home. Some of us, like in Singapore, are fortunate enough to still have the choice – to go out for essentials, exercises and necessary meetings – and it’s interesting having this choice, because it actually forces responsibility on the individual.
It’s easy when you are told what to do but harder when you have to decide what’s best for society, and it gets you to think of the collective good versus the individual need.
So like everyone else, I’ve been on Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp, Facetime – the whole arsenal of tools has been unleashed to allow us humans locked in our isolation cells to communicate.
From all the chat groups and social media feeds, you can tell three-quarters of humanity is bored. The memes, the videos, the cartoons that are circulating – we are all inner comedians, we all need laughter to get us through this dark period. Virtual happy hours, friends just hanging out on screens, yoga, Zumba, tai-chi classes online – we have taken all we do physically online.
Hian Goh of OpenSpace Ventures in our WiT Virtual event this week (watch video) spoke of how his team was having Happy Hours, and how it had brought his team closer together, and that this was the equivalent of an “emotional” hug.
After years of fiddling with video calls and collaborative work tools, we have made the biggest mass migration online, bigger than the wildebeest migration of Kenya, because we have to. Jennifer Cronin, president of Wharf Hotels, in one of our WiT Virtual events spoke about how her teams had been on Microsoft Teams for a while but no one really used it till now.
It appears Covid-19 has the potential to make Princess Warriors out of all hermits. Let’s keep on adapting and fighting.
• Featured image credit: jossdim/Getty Images