By Ali Borhani
Listen to the story or read below.
I vividly remember the first time I met Corona.
It was March 18th 2020 just around sunset. I was half way through my first G&T at a bar in Fitzrovia and reflecting on the madness of the world we live in after another recording of a new episode of Round Peg Podcasts.
There she was sitting at the bar, smiling seductively and staring at me, more of a glance here, a pierce there. The bar was empty. While checking the headlines about London’s response to the pandemic and P.M’s evening press conference on my mobile, I realized she is far closer than I thought. Literally sitting next to me!
I introduced myself and curiously asked her name. She said, “My name is Corona”. I offered her a drink and yet she said “sadly I am allergic to alcohol.”
What do you do at a bar this time of evening I asked?
“Pacing myself, I have been on a very long trip. It started in China but I have been around. I was in other places and met a lot of people in China, Iran, Italy and other countries along the old Silk Road.“
I said aren’t you too young to have been that far and to so many countries alone?
“I am officially 19 and it’s a tradition in our family, the Covid family to be out and about early on.” It was a subtle yet confident way of sharing her age and full name in one shot.
I was intrigued; a second G&T was merited. I asked her, what has she learned being around the world and coming from so far away? She said…
“…you know I was amazed….still amazed by many strange observations…
I am baffled by how oblivion people are to their day-to-day blessings….
The irony that they get more irritated when their mobiles run out of battery, and not reflecting that breaths can run out too…
By the fact that they don’t charge their spirits as often as they charge their phones…
I saw many people whose facial muscles have been in atrophy for years, only because they forgot to smile at one another, or to greet a new day of life…
Witnessed many kids who have not called or paid a visit to their old parents for months, in some cases years though being only a few blocks away…
Hung out with many climate change activists and government heads, vocal about the CO2 emissions…yet suffocating in their own emissions of ego and busy promoting their next book and stifling each other’s policies…
Passed through the Middle East where world powers have been busy in occupations, wars and invasions over the past twenty years and longer, demolishing hospitals, schools and infrastructure…
Meanwhile forgetting to build hospitals in their own countries at least with half the speed or same pace of what they have been destroying behind…
By now the bartender started whistling…
“…you know, whistling is a lost art, those who blow the whistle are endangered species and need protection…if one knows about the importance of whistleblowers it’s me…”
I asked her if she has been to prosperous countries and societies in which wealth and finances were not an issue?
“I did, and yet realized that no matter how big the sovereign wealth fund of a country may be a virus can cause havoc in its social balance sheet…send shivers to the spines of its institutions…
Many cities and countries I visited were built at the foothills of fiscal debt and prone to the mudslides of massive defaults…
My biggest surprise was to hear terms like first world, third world, in different vocabularies…all along the trip I wondered where is the second world?
The well-off cities I passed through where ones in which life moved slower, there was a sense of community, care, contemplation, coherence…people could recite a meaningful old poem…were not rich but affluent despite the hardest challenges…
“How old are you?” Corona asked me, I said 49.
”…Hmmm much older than me…I was only seven years old when financial crisis happened, it’s exactly 12 years ago…a full education cycle since 2008…in between I always wondered, what are people chasing in life…wealth, status, fame or success?
…You see I was in Paris and met a lady who was in search of a special bag in which should carry her Love Values Meaning and Harmony. She told me how disappointed she was when the tour guide took her by mistake to LVMH store instead.”
These were heavy words for a 19 year old, so I asked her what do you want to do? Where are you going from here and after London?
“ I want to be a reminder, to pinch people to be in here and now… if you replace those words and order you are nowhere…here and now is the reality…this moment, this conversation, this is life…
I want to help people to cherish the time and to befriend time once again, to love one another…to love themselves…
To remind them that life is about inhalation and exhalation; no one can live with one or the other alone…that human being is a sacred being because of its humanity…
Have you come across with a pandemic along the way? I asked.
Corona grinned… I immediately sensed I have asked a silly question…she stared at me and said…
“I only know that a pandemic is a common denominator. It makes no distinction between a bricklayer, and a king, a cook or a prime minister, for the head of a continent or head of a family…
…yet the biggest pandemic is indifference…every year 9,000,000 people die from hunger, close to 1,250,000 die in road accidents, some 250,000 men, women and children perished in Iraq war…and close to 50,000 in United States die because of opioids every year…”
Then she looked at my watch and with a mischievous smile said “I have to leave…don’t forget to cherish every second, every minute and every day…
I told you I met people along the way reciting poems, let me will leave you with some parts of a poem by Sohrab Sepehri * a Persian Poet…
Let’s remove the curtains
Let’s taste light
Lets allow our feelings to drink fresh air
Let’s allow our solitude to sing a song
Let’s pick up a pebble from the ground to feel the weight of existence
Let’s not ask where we are
Let’s smell the fresh petunias in the hospital
Let’s set heaven between the two syllables of existence
Let’s fill and empty our lungs with eternity
One must wash eyes, look differently to things
Words must be washed
The word must be the wind itself, the word must the be rain itself…”
As she disappeared on the sidewalk, I chased her to ask another question about love…. yet she was nowhere to be seen.
I felt the urge to sanitize my hands, yet went back to the bar had a toast to life and washed my eyes instead.
© March 2020 – All Rights Reserved – By Ali Borhani
Disclaimer : Ali Borhani is the Managing Director of 3Sixty Strategic Advisors Ltd. and the author of this blog. It is the readers’ responsibility to verify their own facts. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of 3Sixty Strategic Advisors Ltd. or other individual, agency, organization, employer or company.