TIME TO LEARN AND EMBRACE NEW NORMS

Covid-19 has disrupted a lot of activities across the world, but we should take the disruptions as a reason to pause and just be us. The world has not come to a standstill, it is moving, and with a lot of changes and new challenges.

As the proverbial saying goes, every dark cloud has a silver lining, so must we search for the silver lining in this dark cloud that has been brought about by the pandemic. One precious opportunity the current period has provided to people who are working from home is time. A true measure of time as money will come at the end of this pandemic when the rising question will be ‘Did I make good use of the time I had?’  The answer to the question will bring a whole difference between people who made the value of the ‘silver lining’ and those who in turn saw dark clouds and spent the entire period mourning.

One of the most amazing things that the Emerging Leaders Foundation has done during these times is hosting guests for live tweet chats. For me, it has created a free and great learning platform. As one of the guests, Dr. Funso Somorin once tweeted in one of the interactive tweet sessions, ‘The best time to learn is now…. learn new things to survive. The currency of living in learning. If you want to live through this crisis, you have to learn through it.’ There is a great lesson for young people in that.

When talking about learning, it involves creating new norms. There are so many things we have always wanted to know, do, check out or try, but we always never had time for them. It could be that tummy you have always wanted to get rid of; it could that book you always wanted to start reading, or a novel you wanted to try writing. There are lots of things that we have constantly put in our to-do lists or new year resolutions that we have also constantly failed to achieve. Why don’t you give it a try now that we have money – I mean time.

I chose to explore the world of literature further during this time. I have enjoyed loads of talks and gained new information on the same.  As it comes out, there are so many emerging ideas in the literary world that I never came across in a literature class. Afro-futurism is one of the issues that I constantly brushed over and never took time to dig deep and get a better understanding of the same. The majority of young people never really care to self-educate themselves. Instead, they show satisfaction with the ‘little’ content they studied while in school. They lack curiosity and the hunger to explore further. With Covid-19 with us already, it is time to explore, to learn, and equip our minds.

Youth must also use this time to equip themselves. Stella Cheboi – one of the trainers and mentors at ELF- in one of her tweets stated, ‘Personal development is one area young people forget to invest. You should invest in skills that will give you an upper hand to opportunities that will come in post-Covid-19.’ True to her words, there are new norms that will emerge as a result of the pandemic and there will be new ideas needed. Some of us have already lost jobs and might need a new skill to survive altogether. At our places of work, we have learned how we can technologically do things, and the world will want people who are computer savvies –we have learned how not to waste time on things that took us longer, trying to meet one-on-one or make things happen manually. We will be on a new level, on a new normal, and that calls for us to learn so that we are equipped.

Submitted by:

Andrea Otieno- Founder, Pasha Resource Centre.