I was reading British Vogue over the weekend. The cover of the issue was a photograph of a simple landscape, all fields and clouds. In the bottom right hand corner of the cover was just one word, printed in plain, white font: Reset.
There were no fashion models, no impossibly smooth contours, no bright colours, no flash headlines. Instead, just a moody landscape that could have been shot by anyone.
The issue, obviously compiled during this Corona period, was about change. Nestled between the glossy ads and pages of “must have” items, were some very real articles about the unique times we live in, as a world, fighting off this virus.
In his editorial letter, Edward Enninful, writes:
“But a truth has been exposed by the tumultuous events of 2020: there is no normal to return to…normal is what got us to this place in the first place. If we are going to evolve, to a place of greater fairness and safety for our planet and its people, our future cannot look exactly like our past. We are going to need a genuine rethink about many areas of our lives. Our attitudes, our priorities, our compassion. What and how we consume. What we stand for and how we voice it. It’s easy to feel tired or daunted, to look at the past few months and simply think, “I’ve had enough.” But let’s be honest: normal wasn’t working.”
I didn’t realise this was still on my mind until tonight, during my walk. Lots of my best thinking gets done on my walks. Tonight, as I walked a slightly different route home, I found myself thinking about the notion of being able to “reset” life.
It’s appealing, but also daunting to think that the world is giving us a chance to start over, to carve out the path we want for ourselves. It’s appealing to think about all the positive changes that can happen. But it’s daunting because it gives us a huge responsibility to actually make those changes happen.
It also means it’s on all of us to implement that change, in order to create that huge domino effect of positivity. It can’t happen by itself.
The world has been shaken up like a snow globe, and just like in an actual snow globe the sparkles never settle in the same place, Corona has also landed us with fresh perspectives.
It’s a challenging time, but it’s also an opportunity we don’t usually get — to view our lives from different angles.
With all this in mind, I’ll leave you with some questions:
If you were given the opportunity to reset your life, or even a part of your life, would you, and what would you change?
If you were given the opportunity to affect change in the world at large, how would you begin to do so? What would you do differently?
What would you like to see happen, and how would you help achieve that goal?
