100 days of hope — 4. A new variant of hope

Every time the COVID-19 virus replicates, it is a chance for a mutation to emerge that causes the new strain to interact with it’s environment in a different way. For a new strain of COVID-19 to proliferate it needs to be more resilient to it’s environment than the other strains also present.

You can look at humanity in a similar light. Every challenge that we face causes us to adapt to do our best to thrive within our environment. Through a purely biological lens the tragedy this entails is incredibly clear — we have already lost over 2,400,000 million people to this vicious virus.

But unlike the virus, humans are not constrained to their biology. We have other ways we can respond in the face of adversity.

We can laugh, we can smile, we can do 100 laps of our garden, we can share, we can remember (those we have lost), we can witness.

We of course can become more resilient as individuals, but my hunch is that the real strength and resilience of the new strain of humanity that is brewing in response to this virus will come from the shared hope of a better future, the shared acceptance of our collective vulnerability and the shared determination for cooperation over competition. For competition is all a virus can ever know, it is the limit of its consciousness. But there is much more on offer for us humans to bring to the table.