by Anita Mendiratta | Dec 27, 2020
We’re almost there!!
With Out Of Office notifications now activated, menorahs being carefully packed away, wrapping paper being collected from the base of Christmas trees, another round of turkey sandwiches being prepared from feasty left-overs, and playful off-line pauses being enjoyed before countdowns begin towards New Year’s Eve, a new excitement is building – a feisty one.
The close of 2020 is soooo close!
The sleep-count is shrinking. A new wave is growing, one reaching millions across the globe. It’s not the latest COVID-19 wave, though sadly that too is also moving swiftly, widely, mercilessly once more, putting strain on global healthcare systems and frontliners – new strains starting to emerge and travel.
This particular wave is spreading through a hashtag: #FU2020. Quickly, with variations of cursing. The hashtag is sharing millions upon millions of reasons to raise a fist to the sky, and a glass at midnight on 31 12 2020, for all 2020 has been for us all. The editing filter has been dropped.
First articulation of frustration and fiery sentiment started to appear as our calendars reached the Winter Solstice of 2020: “The shortest day of the longest ____ year of our lives”, one posting read. There was something almost permission-granting about the overt admission of just how long, hard, and hope-challenging 2020 has been.
Growing momentum of growling is impossible to ignore. Humorous messages and memes capture all that has been missed out on this year, all across the world, the agnostic, aching nature of this unnatural year out there for all to see.
The bubbling anger, angst and anxiousness for 2020 to be ‘done’ is so very real, so raw. In the final seconds of 2020 countdown there will be, no doubt, swearing accompanying singing – laughter a needed release after long months needing to stay strong, stay hopeful, hold on. Sparks of the confidence and courage reignited to take us into 2021.
But please, please just stop – please don’t just rush into 2021.
Not just yet…not until the tears have been allowed to fall.
As tempting as it is to write off 2020, we can’t – our hearts might not be ready.
Midnight will come, and we will hopefully be together with loves ones – those we can within the rules and regulations. But before that moment happens, before looking forward, please just wait a moment.
Be alone.
Be still.
Be brave.
Look back…
Allow your heart to breathe, to feel the year now closing. To cry.
2020 has been redefining, rewiring, really, really hard. For everyone.
There is no competition: everyone has suffered, everyone is grieving in some way.
Loved ones, loved moments, livelihoods, chances of a lifetime,
Gone.
No one has escaped 2020 unscathed:
Children or grown-ups,
Friends or foes,
Near or far,
No one.
Which is why before we raise our glasses to 2021 we need to let the 2020 tears fall.
Healthy tears – quiet, thoughtful, cleansing, healing tears.
Tears from as far back as the first months of 2020 when shock first hit, when we knew something was scary-wrong, when doors and borders and businesses and skies and hearts started to close.
Tears marking the changing of the seasons, all other signs of time passing feeling a blur.
Tears tightly holding in the emotions felt when bad news hit, and then hit again, and then hit again.
Tears of simply being tired, tired of the uncertainty, tired of the endlessness, tired of being tired.
The wounds of 2020 are deep, the scars will take decades to erase, if ever.
But the healing must start. Now. As our minds register the milestone of the close of 2020.
Now is a time for healing.
In time, at some point in time, our storytelling will select memories of this time, sifting through the hurt and heartache to find ways of creating a hopeful, helpful narrative. That time will come.
But for now, right here and right now is what matters.
May the gift you give yourself in the final hours of 2020 be the chance to allow those waiting-patiently tears to rise, be released, and quietly run down your cheek in a way that releases your heart of all of the holding-on that has been so needed each day of this year.
Whatever is ahead in 2021, 2020 will soon be done.
We’re almost there.
Make a wish….x
Copyright: ANITA MENDIRATTA 2020
by Anita Mendiratta | Nov 30, 2020
Tomorrow will be December.
A new month – the final month of what was to be a new year: 2020, unlocking all of the hope and possibility, confidence and certainty of a new decade. Little did we know what 2020 would bring, how locked in we would all be, not just physically…and how grateful we would be for it to end.
As we look to close 2020, understandably wishing to forget so much that has happened – the horror, the heartache, the losses, the longings – moving too quickly into 2021 would be missing the point. It feels it would be such a waste to have it as a chapter in the history books with the pages left blank. As hard as it is to find the words to describe 2020, or as risky as it would be to put the words in writing for fear of their heat burning through the pages, they must be written.
Why? Because to leave the pages blank would be to leave 2020 unfinished in its messages, its meaning and its memories worth remembering.
Think about it……..
What if “2020” had not happened?
What if 2020 was simply the year that followed 2019.
Where would we be?
What would we be doing?
Who would we be seeing….and not?
What would we be valuing?
Just when we thought we had it all, all under control all by ourselves, Mother Nature made it very clear who is really in charge. And what she felt was needing to be truly valued.
As soon as 2020 began the dominoes started to fall, first indications coming in January that there was trouble with this thing called the Coronavirus, now what we know as COVID-19. As it started to creep across the world from East to West borders started to shut, airline started to ground. We knew something was wrong, something was seriously wrong.
For years and years, as one blessed to be travelling over 200 days/annum with an aerial view of the world, 2020 has been a year lived, viewed, through a zoom lens. My last travels before the world shut down were mid-March – Miami for Board meetings, a full moon trying to calm stormy skies as flights were being cancelled. It was time to get home, quickly. Looking through photographs of this year a feeling of awe emerges seeing just how many images there were watching the world close up – the world of other little creatures, whether it be squirrels, swans, geese, bees, bugs, whatever it might be. And for the first time really appreciating the magic of being in one place.
It’s been a challenging year, no doubt. Milestones missed, marriages missed, memorials missed, loved ones now lost are so missed, life’s work for many is no more. Never should these moments be moved on from without pause for prayer.
Thankfully, those I love have been safe – near, far, wherever they may have been grounded. I am very blessed that my business has been safe – work more intense and purposeful than I have ever known in my two decades of operation. Every day has been as humbling as it has been exhausting, AM&A’s singular focus being ensuring no one feels alone in facing the trauma of 2020. My AM&A girls have been absolutely incredible – we have been nonstop, operating as a compass and an anxiety sponge for our Clients as the global Travel & Tourism was brought to its knees like never in its history, and it has a long, long way to go before momentum comes close to 2019 levels of travel (latest estimate is only 2024). 98% of our work that we’re doing has been from within in the eye of the storm, moving through layers of crisis: the pandemic, its resulting economic crisis, the unlocking of mental health crisis – helping clients, helping partners, helping people through, trying to make sense of what in the world is going on. Our role, our impact, our sense blessing, has been vividly clear every single day. For this reason, month after month we have given back, as much as we can, because we can.
As with all, the year has been lived in the main on-line. While geo-forced apart, like everyone worldwide, 2020 has meant hundreds and hundreds of hours on-air, our world through a small screen.Thank goodness for those spinning satellites in the sky keeping us all connected.
Ans so, as we look at the end of 2020, there’s not much more I can say other than simply this: I am thankful. I am thankful for what we have. I am thankful for those who have been spared. I am thankful for what’s been created from this time. As I have said hundreds of times this year: “There is NO going back to normal – there is no ‘back’ and there certainly is no ‘normal'” The value and values of every day have shifted. 2020 has taken much, and yet it has also given.
May 2021 bring a new hope:
- a stronger awareness of how we need each other more profoundly than we ever imagined,
- a stronger appreciation for the world around us,
- a stronger commitment to actively support its wellness – naturally, socially, culturally, spiritually and economically,
- and a stronger sense of blessings for simply being ‘safe”,
And may we carry into the year(s) ahead of us that it really is so important to stop and smell the roses….and see the swan-babies grow, feed the squirrels, and rescue the ladybugs….before boarding a next flight. x
Copyright: ANITA MENDIRATTA 2020
by Anita Mendiratta | Oct 31, 2020
As we near the beginning of November – awed that we are into the countdown to the end of the year, bewildered by the blur behind us – it is impossible to not pause and think of all that has been.
2020 is not over yet, but still, who could have known that the roaring ‘20s would come with such a fierce bite!
This year has taken us all by surprise. Globally grounded, it has kept us in a state of disconnectedness in so many ways, regardless of how our virtual world operating, organising and other e-social skills have strengthened.
Since the beginning, as fear spread as quickly as the virus from East to West, the world became united in a state of shock. Together we have transitioned through 2020, month after month, wondering how long will this last, how severe will be the losses of lives and livelihoods, how we will possibly get back on our feet again – especially as a member of the global Travel & Tourism community that has been brought to its knees.
COVID-19 stopped us. Logistically and emotionally. Initial closing of businesses, borders and skies forced us to look carefully at the worlds in which we operated – what we valued deeply, what values we held dear. With dramatic restrictions on our mobility, the radius of our lives decreasing like never universally experienced before this generation, we have been forced to restructure our worlds, blur our lines (if not erase completely), rethinking the role of work, the role of play, the role of family, the role of friends, the time we have for each other, the space that we have for ourselves.
Ultimately 2020 has been a defining line of text of this generation. Mother Nature, fed-up with how poorly we were taking care of her world, upset with how we were focusing on our own needs at the cost of hers, forced us all to stop, sent us back to our rooms to think about what we had done wrong. We were not to be let out until we had figured out how we could do better – we were going to build forward better.
So, how are we going to create a world that is more caring of not just ourselves, but of our communities of our countries and over our environment around us? Before 2020 we talked about sustainability. In the main the term was used, at best, as a strategic pillar of business and government strategies. At a minimum it was a strategic footnote. But did we really respect it for what it meant, past, present and future? Do we now?
Now it is THE priority.
With our world being grounded we have seen, finally, the need to recognise the definition as so much more than simply ‘green’. ‘Sustainability’ stretches across all dimensions of lives and livelihoods: economic sustainability, cultural sustainability, spiritual sustainability, social sustainability…and environmental sustainability. It is about ensuring we do not put ourselves in a position of erosion, extinction, bankruptcy, nothingness. It is about sustaining survival. Simple
The bottom line is quadruple bottom line. ‘Sustainability’ is a call to action.
How then do we look back the world we are leaving in 2020? And look forward to the one ahead in 2021? Looking back is not enough. Nor looking forward. Creating a sustainable future demands that we look into the mirror. It has been remarkable to see how now, just days before country after country in the northern hemisphere goes into the second wave of COVID-19 with second rounds of lockdowns, and just days before election day begins in the United States of America, many of us look at the challenge ahead with nervousness in our hearts, untrusting of the outcomes. Crisis, a next one, may be just around the corner.
This year has exposed very vividly the difference in our wiring – how our brains process crisis, and how our hearts and bodies respond thereafter. And that’s okay. People respond differently to crisis. People respond differently to opportunity. People respond differently to risk. People respond differently to joy.
Through each passing day, month, COVID-19 phase of 2020, we are all in a situation where we are responding differently, together. All we know for certain is that uncertainty is ahead of us. It is not about political uncertainty, social uncertainty, economic uncertainty. As our countries work through the pandemic and its impact, closing down country after country, it is about uncertainty at a humanitarian level.
Are we able to take care of each other, together, equally, for the long run?
As we look ahead, as shared earlier, this call to action has become a defining element of not just this year, but this generation. We have been so blessed to have had so much for so long. In 2020 we have been forced to stop and think: are we ready for the world ahead of us as active participants, not just admiring passengers?
Now is the time, and the opportunity, for all of us to step up, masks on, ready to create a stronger, more united, more genuinely grateful tomorrow.
2020 has roared, exposing the ferocity of its bite. This is our time to roar back. For as beautifully expressed by Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a lamb.”
Copyright: ANITA MENDIRATTA 2020
by Anita Mendiratta | Sep 29, 2020
We live in a world without smiles. At least in 2020.
Why? Because we live in a COVID-19 world of masks. Masks, protecting one another, in a year of a pandemic that is defining our generation, even though we’re still trying to define what exactly it is and how exactly it is going to impact us.
It has not been easy getting used to living in a world without smiles, especially considering how dearly we have needed smiles this year – smiles to provide comfort, smiles to provide calm, smiles to show compassion, smiles to show we care. But in our quest to care by covering up, we lose our smiles.
To remove smiles from daily life is to remove sunshine. Always there, even is cracking through heavy clouds overhead, the comfort of the sun’s presence sets a mood. There is always reason to look up.
In the first days and weeks of 2020 as COVID-19 spread across the globe, masks began to appear. Rapidly. Regulations, whether by choice or by mandate, differing though they may be country to country, became a growing presence. Some plain, some patterned, some creative expressions of personality, all were symbols of growing fears around an invisible, life and lifestyle changing phenomena. For most, the thought of a pandemic was a concept beyond all comprehension. The ability to protect oneself was beyond anything familiar. We all needed to take cover. Including covering up.
And so masks began to appear as clouds overhead only grew heavier and heavier, skies rapidly filling with trepidation, storms brewing with uncertainty around the disasters ahead. Doors, borders, skies all closed, human connection was blocked.
As time has passed, the block has become the norm. What we thought, hoped, was just a few passing months of management of this new challenge to our shared world has become a crisis defining our year. Possibly even longer. More and more masks surround us, more and more smiles have disappeared.
With this natural, omnipresent form of emotional connection covered, with our expressions of care, love, joy, excitement, gratitude, compassion, consideration and concern covered, how are we to communicate? How are we to remain hopeful?
A new language has emerged, a new channel for communication: our eyes.
It’s all about the eyes.
Especially in these still fragile times. Like smiles, eyes have become a universal form of expression, a way of sharing, immediately, one’s mindset, a doorway into one’s thoughts.
The eyes reveal far more. When we were able to see smiles, we may never have appreciated the power of the eyes. In these COVID19 times when awareness of others is so important, eyes reveal fear, they reveal friendliness. With fatigue and frustration increasingly becoming a part of daily restrictions to life as we once knew it, choosing to ease off of caution rather than keep a mask on or keep a safe distance, eyes can reveal flippancy, and they can reveal forgetfulness.
To travel once again after so many months grounded is to see, feel, and appreciate, the power of the eyes.
As slowly our world is reopening, tourism cautiously re-starting, it is impossible to not notice the different look in the eyes of strangers, travellers, and the eyes of those being travelled to. From airports to airlines, taxi drivers to hotels, it’s all in the eyes. Whoever it is, it is the eyes that now speak.
And in those eyes, one gets a whole new understanding of the COVID-19 world in which we live, and in which we are trying to travel. Communication of the eyes has become one that we rely on to be able to trust. And as expressed by the Secretary General of the UNWTO, “Trust is the new currency”.
Trust. All of it is channelled through the eyes. There are few other ways of communicating that sense of “I will take care of me to take care of you.”
This is critical as we continue to try to make sense of so much that remains changing, rapidly. From a travel perspective, these changes have been in many places and for many people, painfully, the opening and then quickly closing of borders, hotels, restaurants, minds – lives and livelihoods changed in a moment.
How do we make sense of it all in the world of travel? At least in the next 12 months, we need to recognise that the language of the eyes is one that we need to rely onto be able to reconnect with the world, recognising that people in the world are reconnecting with their own world. The lack of a smile does not mean the lack of feeling.
For millions around us, their eyes are filled with fear – their lives and their livelihoods being taken away because of this invisible pandemic that has hit every single one of the 7.9 billion people in the world, right between the eyes, and in the heart.
In our hearts, through our eyes, we need to ensure we do not lose sight of the need to remain compassionate towards others. As hard as these times are, as hard as it can be thinking beyond the “I” to consider the “we” and the “them”, we need to appreciate that with so much around us continuing to be challenging, and changing – all of this scary – we still have a long time until this is all over.
There is a reason why we are all familiar with the expression: “The eyes are the mirror to the soul.” In these times of unparalleled crisis, because this invisible, agnostic, inescapable virus puts everyone at risk, everyone needs everyone. As confident and courageous and cocooned as we may think we are, our eyes reveal how we need the consideration and compassion of others to maintain stamina to see the end of this generation-defining time.
Ultimately the warmth and wonder of our world comes through connecting with people. 2020’s #COVID19-defined year has unlocked a new way of communicating, a new way of connecting – giving us a new reason to look up. x
Copyright: ANITA MENDIRATTA 2020
by Anita Mendiratta | Aug 17, 2020
Just 10 days ago the world watched in absolute horror as the Port of Beirut was shaken to the ground – the hopes and lives of the people of Beirut, and across Lebanon, altered irreversibly.
Immediately one looks for reason. How? Why? Why now? What now?
The Gods were angry.
But whose Gods, and why?
So many options. So many reasons. And so what – what good does the debating do?
Whatever the source, the stretch of recovery ahead, or the arguments surrounding righting wrongs, it feels as though 2020 has become a forced daily reflection of the fact that global complexity has entered a new creative territory: fiction, possibly even science fiction.
04.08.2020. With whiplash speed, global focus immediately shifts. From COVID-19 spikes, surges, second and third wave storylines, the story immediately, dramatically, tragically moved to Beirut – investigations around the sources of the explosion, questions around how simple fertilizer could cause such profound destruction, questions around sources, questions around survivors, questions around the future of one of the world’s most monitored cities as a reflection of rumblings of change. Beirut was already in a devastated state of infrastructure and leadership system paralysis, its people already struggling to remain hopeful around a stronger, safer, more secure tomorrow. And then, in a split second, these rumblings literally exploded, rocking the nation – its shockwaves tearing at the heart of its flag while tearing across the world.
As the numbers of lives and livelihoods lost grew, statistics turning faces and families into figures for ongoing monitoring, it was the individual stories that started to emerge that kept the world’s hearts and minds centered on what really mattered. Who really mattered. Every single person in Beirut who’s life was not broken because of the blast.
A signature impression of that now-historic day’s unimaginable moment of devastation: an exquisite bride swept away during her photo shoot, live video footage capturing the transition of one of the most beautiful moments of her life into one of the most horrific. As revealed in a touching follow-up CNN interview, her life and that of her love were spared….but her love for her native Lebanon will never be the same. Her heart is broken, her hopes for a country once adored are broken. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kPL1MdexeA
As are those of families having to deal with immense loss of loved ones, loved places, lives unable to be lived. The challenges continue. The people of Beirut immediately took to the streets to clean up the rubble, claim back their lives.
The crisis facing Beirut in the aftermath of the port explosion, and resignation of Government soon after, has left a deep, dark, devastating crater in the country’s economic, political and social structures, not to mention emotional. It will take years and billions to rebuild and recovery. To heal.
Suddenly a variation in the scene emerges: some are wearing masks, some are not. The masks are not for protection from the dust and debris. The masks are to protect them from COVID-19.
Oh good lord, COVID-19.
“It’s just one crisis after another“, millions around the world can be heard saying in despair, disbelief and hope-fatigue.
But it’s not. There is, and always will be, a fundamental flaw in such a statement.
In times of crisis great minds and hearts come together in an effort to ensure that not only is the crisis’ impact minimised, but to try to find the truisms that will take us forward repeatedly. We keep hearing that every crisis prepares us for the next, every opportunity to learn making us stronger. Crisis after crisis after crisis.
Philosophically this is correct.
Practically, however, it is simply wrong.
Crisis is not linear – it is layered.
In Lebanon, COVID-19 did not stop in Beirut because there needed to be an immediate start to cleaning up the city – it’s infrastructure, it’s politics, it’s hopes for the future.
As we now move through August we see that in the southern part of the U S and in the Caribbean, once again, hurricane season is starting. Mother Nature will not stop the annual, cyclical clock because we are focused on COVID-19.
There will be a next crisis, and a next, and a next, be it economic, political, social, natural, beyond-fictional. These are all layers. One on top of the other, varying in degrees of duration, damage, depth of impact.
Look again at Lebanon – a place now facing one of the greatest social, political and economic challenges of its generation (if not history) with COVID19, economic and political collapse, and infrastructure eradication. All of this, all while was already facing the pressures of compassionately hosting over a 1.5 million refugees that were fleeing the war in Syria, refugees trying to find peace, protection and promise in a neighbouring nation. The refugee crisis does not stop for COVID-19. COVID-19 does not stop for cleanup. The clean-up does not stop until a new, trusted Government is created.
Crisis is layered. And what we must make sure we do is not forget one of those layers.
As we layer on the next, adding on layers and layers, it is vital that we recognise through it all that no one facing these layers should ever stand alone. Layers, their impact, and their victims, cannot be ranked. Their interwoven nature must be recognised and respected as a critical part of holistic, humane recovery.
As seen with COVID-19, our shared world’s invisible, primal, merciless, crisis completely uncaring of borders, boundaries, politics, lives, livelihoods, age, gender, culture, seasons or social standing,:
- COVID-19’s mental health crisis does not wait until physical health crisis is over,
- its economic crisis does not wait for the mental health crisis to pass,
- surviving the physical health crisis of Wave 1 does not protect us from Wave 2.
The layers are all connected.
As are we all, wherever on the map, on the curve, on the news lineup, we may be. And in today’s 2020+ world of layered, logic-defying, longevity-redefining crisis, the message from Mother Nature is clear, the human truth undeniable: we either all win…or we all lose.
So too the truths of crisis:
- Crisis will never be linear – we need to live with, push through, survive, and stay connected to work to suppress the layers.
- Crisis will never leave us – they will always be present, in one form or another, in one layer or another.
and critically:
- Crisis must never define us. Our definition comes from our layers of faith and fortitude.
And that is the bottom line. x
Copyright: ANITA MENDIRATTA 2020
We live in a world without smiles. At least in 2020.
Just 10 days ago the world watched in absolute horror as the Port of Beirut was shaken to the ground – the hopes and lives of the people of Beirut, and across Lebanon, altered irreversibly.