The world has been challenged before to fight common threats and tackle global challenges. For almost a decade now, we have heard that we collectively needed to address the common issues that endanger the evolution of our civilization, as we knew it.
There were many situations that we had to overcome, but the situation we are living today with the Coronavirus crisis is unprecedented.
As a Society, we are all standing in a standstill in the quietness of the quarantine. All at once. At the same moment. One by one, every nation has been regrouping into this solemn silence.
This silence has brought deaths. May they rest in peace.
This silence has brought uncertainty and fears.
This silence has brought light to unheard and unspoken sufferings.
I was touched by the sharing of different stories – the latest being the story of the Welsh singer Duffy in her own words. A beautiful insight into someone suffering that shaped the last 10 years of her life. How many of us alone during dire times? How many of our stories were untold due to our shame or the frenetic path of a society where success seems to have a unique definition? A way of life where there is simply no time for deep human connections – even with oneself.
We can take the time to meditate, to reflect and think. Yet, the overall society does not nurture this natural human need to be still.
Silence has became very rare.
Silence sometimes cannot even be found anymore.
This silence has brought our human activities to a standstill enabling the Earth to regenerate thus limiting the devastating effects of human activities on our own habitat. No species in nature are self-destructive as we, humans, have proven to be.
This silence has saved our habitat.
This beautiful silence has brought new forms of solidarities.
This beautiful silence has brought oneness visible.
This beautiful silence is giving us an unprecedented opportunity to stop time.
This beautiful silence is giving us the gift to re-write our stories and History.
And for that, I am grateful.
I see you.
Here an extract from a text from Dag Hammarskjöldin, 1957.
‘We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence. This house, dedicated to work and debate in the service of peace, should have one room dedicated to silence in the outward sense and stillness in the inner sense. It has been the aim to create in this small room a place where the doors may be open to the infinite lands of thought and prayer. (…) There is an ancient saying that the sense of a vessel is not in its shell but in the void. So it is with this room. It is for those who come here to fill the void with what they find in their center of stillness‘.