COVID affected our lives, no doubt about it, but how many people actually changed their lives?
I met one. His name is Mark and he lives on a farm.
After working in the corporate world for many years he decided to leave Paris for the countryside. He bought an old farm in the middle of France, four buildings but they were just a little more than ruins, and started renovations to make it home.
Mark saw Covid-19 as an opportunity to break away from a life of stress, deadlines and noises. It’s the model society forces us to follow without even presenting alternatives. But alternatives exist, they are out there, it’s up to us to go and grab them. I understand it’s not easy to do, I struggle with it myself, constantly shifting from living as a hermit and meeting people in the buzz of a big city. The reason being: comforts dictate a way of working, not only living, which is really hard to have without certain facilities. Think about being a doctor, a filmmaker, a graphic designer, a travel agent without a computer, a phone, access to energy to charge equipment. After Covid our dependency from technology went even worse, now more jobs have a requirement to access a computer. Teachers, for example, are required to teach online. This not only means they have to know how to use a computer and stream their video online (with no age limitations, imagine how hard it can be for a sixty years old teacher) but also they need to have a home with a stable connection. What if that person didn’t want to use electricity that much, or stare at a screen with no physical contact?
Little things like this happen all the time in our society and we don’t even realise how dangerous they are to us. All the regulations are based on one model and one model only. A model that someone chose, developed and then “asked” others to follow. Whoever that person was he didn’t wait for any approval from citizens. He just declare that was the “model”.
Now think of how beautiful it would be if different models exist, all equally approved by the government, so you don’t have to struggle in finding alternative ways of living. One day is disliking the war when everybody around you is happy to die for their country, another is injecting something in your body when the government is saying it’s for your safety. What it didn’t change is freedom, our allowance to experiment with ways of living and working.
So if you want to live alternatives then you are considered an outsider from society, someone to look at with suspicion. That’s why this magazine is here, that’s why I’m still going out to find stories and reporting those to you. It’s important to keep a variety of thinking, knowledge and lives. In a globalised world it’s important to preserve differences.
Going back to Mark, our hero of the day, I’m happy to say he understood all this, that’s why he made the big step to leave the city and move to the countryside.
Of course he had this idea for some time: the spiritual trips to India he was making, the decision to become vegan, to stop drinking and smoking were all signals to a change. But to make the last step, the one that required more commitment he needed an extra push, and Covid helped him with that.
Not only does he gain more space to think, he also reconnects with nature to a deeper level, something you can only have when you live in nature, not next to it.
I could spend other lines here to say what his thoughts are but I think it’s best to hear straight from him.
Watch this interview I made on my visit to his farm.
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