My mother would have turned 100 last Sunday. We held a virtual reunion to honour our roots and celebrate family bonds. A family which stretches round the world, with relatives in every continent except Antarctica.
People in our family just seem to travel. Fall in love with someone from a different country, embrace a different culture, settle thousands of miles apart. All four of us in our generation have grandchildren in another part of the world. We straddle Central, Latin and North America; China; Southern Africa; the UK.
Global diversity enriches us. Our minds take in fresh perspectives. Our thinking broadens. And, like many other families at this point of time, we worry. It’s tough when one of the family is laid low by the virus and we can’t visit. It’s tough when we can’t visit and bond with newly born grandchildren.
Not only are we impacted by short term restrictions on travel: - we also wonder whether the ease with which we have jumped on flights from one side of the world to the other will ever return. This is something which we can’t know now and probably won’t ever be able to influence. And it’s a first world problem. The impact on world trade threatens livelihoods and survival for millions of people.
So, we focus on what we have, which is vastly better than a few generations ago, when relatives sailed for Australia, Argentina or Canada and were lost to communication of any sort for years if not decades. Then a letter on tissue thin blue paper in minute spidery writing was a one-way message once in a very long while. Now we have email, telephone, social media, messaging services and video conferencing. Fill the screen with your loved ones and talk, enquire how others are, listen, share jokes, raise a glass. Do it often enough and it becomes natural, smooth, nourishing.
Supporting each other remotely comes to seem ever more important. The pandemic is impacting every country. Restrictions on the way of life we’d all come to accept as our right, are in place everywhere to limit the spread of wave after wave of contagion. It’s a global virus – and wherever we live, we can do our bit for our own health, our family’s health and global health by adopting a different way of life for the present moment, and by mining the treasure of our relationships.
Sarah Gornall is a UK-based executive coach and author. Her most recent book, written with Jenny Bird, is "How to Work with People... and Enjoy It!"
