The pandemic of Covid-19 has hit our societies with unprecendented violence, leaving us disempowered and with a sense of great vulnerability. However the days we are living may also have beneficial aspects and become a teachable moment. How will we come out of this crisis? Alumni (promo 17) and lawyer Valentina Lana shares with Émile her thoughts and future perspectives on the peculiar crisis we are experiencing.

In the midst of the current pandemic, the world finds itself bewildered, asking when all of this will be behind us, how our planet will look, and, more profoundly, why this happened in the first place.

Science can provide some of the answers, but not all, as we are facing a new virus, whose spread cannot be fully controlled or measured in a way that could provide the certainty and sense of control that we are used to, and that would give comfort to our seeking spirits.

The overarching challenge in this crisis consists in our coping with an atrophied ability to deal with the unknowability of life, to be imperturbable even when the solution to a problem seems not easily available, and the conditions to find it uncertain.

Moreover, we are asked on a daily basis to rely on others: on governments to decide what the best measures are to limit the propagation of the virus, on health practitioners to do all they can to save lives, on scientists to find a cure or a vaccine, on machines and a sound infrastructure to communicate.

The result is that we feel disempowered, and the necessary restriction of personal liberties weighs less on us than the shake-up of taken-for-granted (and no longer questioned) certainties about our position in the world and our role in society.

The Western world is hit at its heart, and puzzled for being stricken by a phenomenon that was relegated to history books or to other, far away countries, with standards of living considered as inferior.

Yet, the crisis is global, and the virus seems to point to the radical equality of the members of the social consortium: we are all exposed and vulnerable, none of us is immune, our loved ones - wherever they are - could be infected, and no insurance exists: no medication, no vaccine, no financial shield, no elevated position in a hierarchy, no power suffices to immunize.

However, even in the midst of this crisis, there is abundant space for hope.

Resources, in our day and age, abound to connect people: nowadays, isolation does not rhyme anymore with solitude, as solutions to still be able to communicate with others exist, though as humans we still long for and need contact and physical proximity.

This crisis is showing us that isolated, or distanced from each other, still we can feel and indeed be closer, eager to break barriers that are psychologically intolerable, and feel a developed and vitalized solidarity as members of humanity.

The seclusion caused by the calamity, and our waiting and longing for answers, will probably trigger, as a beneficial byproduct, a re-accustoming to the medium-to-long term, to the patience that is required to and by nature, and whose meaning we lost in an age of immediate response and automatic - at times stultifying - processes, leaving no room for doubts and delays. 

As the pandemic will not have caused - or so we predict - the loss of millions of lives (though each life lost is regrettable) and a destruction of existing infrastructures, a return to normal in terms of production seems, so far, not so strenuous an achievement.

Additionally, and this is probably the most comforting and hopeful message, each one of us will come out of this with a different perspective on life and priorities, or, at least, a slightly more pronounced inclination to reconsider what really counts and establish a healthier order and definition of things that come first.

As a humanity, we will come out of this not stronger, but strengthened in our relation to others, close and far, and in our solidarity, as neighbors, citizens, business operators, corporate citizens, countries and civilizations.

The existing and fortified barriers and borders can be seen as inevitable means to the safeguard of lives, but as well as to an unintended end, which is a lesser perception of other barriers, and a feeling of brotherhood and membership in a same community of equals, all equally exposed and vulnerable, all needing protection and comfort, medical care and soothing words to nourish the spirit.

We ask ourselves what leadership and courage look like in this crisis and we find that, once again, they do not correspond to our long held beliefs: the hero is no longer and not necessarily acting, but (s)he is idle on stage, observing, and finding ways to yet express, reach out and connect with others to learn, care, comfort, protect.

The days we are living are unprecedented: they could and should become a teachable moment, and they will, in both conscious and subconscious ways.

At the end of the crisis, the light will be our individual and collective embracing life to the fullest: our own life but also others' lives, our humanity as simultaneously a shared condition, place and time to be, to welcome, to learn and to improve thanks to each other.