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What Next?

That is probably a question many of us were asking over the two years of COVID.

COVID has been a significant disruption for all of us and has, for sure, demonstrated with startling clarity how interwoven everything is.

We have been blocked in many ways, yet there are many lessons in it all.

The systemic problems that the virus has sharply highlighted are as interwoven as everything else. We can’t solve them all at once, but persistently addressing one manageable area at a time can work if we act together.

There is a clear and urgent need for us to do this. It’s not likely to make life easy. But if we don’t learn from the pandemic how to improve our collaborative response to existential threats (and quickly), we will fail to address the burning issue of climate change with catastrophic consequences.

The barriers to doing this can be overcome, but it will seem hard at first, and we will need to feel our way into the next phase, finding what can work by trying. Not assuming that we automatically have the answer because we see the problem.

One knot at a time, persistently acting together, we can release the tangle and bypass the misguided and often aggressive resistance to solving the genuine dangers we all face.