Greta Thunberg is really
touching at the point of how bad we want it.More of one third of the population is
confined.How bad we want it to
control the epidemic.
"Though it must be in a different way to
how we have acted in this case, we can act fast and change our habits and treat
a crisis like a crisis."
How bad we want it to win in
triathlon.How bad we want to control
global warming.Boris Johnson, Trump and
our president denied the pandemic until lately, pressured by the virus’
consequences.In our previous post we
mentioned that Irvin Yalom learned empathy pressured by an angry father who
confronted him when he was twelve.
The difference between the
winner and the loser in triathlon has to do with the ability to learn because
we want
it bad.How bad you want to
learn in order to perform is the key.Overcoming handicaps culturally, handicaps in the family and handicaps
individually, regarding education is what somebody in the third world
country needs to do. Do not wait for the
coronavirus to come or being confronted by life in a similar way; it is too
late by then.And sadly, even then, one’s
chances of learning depend on how much one has already learned to grasp the situation.Sometimes we are already dead before realizing
that we lost a chance in life.
I had a patient who died
from cancer, who used to say to his teenage son: “Do I have to die in order for
you to understand life.”
I will reproduce what Irvin
Yalom says about his way of learning what empathy is.
Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others.
In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on
himself. He opens his story with a nightmare: He is twelve and is riding his
bike past the home of an acne-scarred girl. Like every morning, he calls out,
hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in his dream, the girl's
father makes Yalom understand that his daily greeting had hurt her. For Yalom,
this was the birth of empathy; he would not forget the lesson. As Becoming Myself unfolds, we
see the birth of the insightful thinker whose books have been a beacon to so
many. This is not simply a man's life story, Yalom's reflections on his life
and development are an invitation for us to reflect on the origins of our own
selves and the meanings of our lives.
Empathy is what is needed in
this coronavirus epidemic.Most of us
will not die from it, but we should have empathy for the most vulnerable
people, elderly, chronically sick, etc.Empathy is needed to improve as an athlete and human being. It is something lacking in some athletes due
to the policies followed by countries where the athlete is created by the system
with the purpose of performing as such; Sun Yang is an example.The developed nations create athletes with
the purpose of creating a good human being, college sports were originated for
this purpose.Many filters are on the
way in order to become professionals.Athletes need to pass many filters to end up as professional players;
even basketball or football players need to pass filters as school point
average –it says a lot about focusing on things other than delinquency.We have witnessed the problems with some
basketball or football recruiters when the recruiters bypass the filters
looking for performance without looking at creating a great human being; Aaron
Hernandez and many others are examples.Empathy is a sine-qua-non to create a good human being and coronavirus epidemic
is an opportunity to learn it.The same
situation lived by Irvin Yalom when he was confronted by an angry father.
We know the rules to follow
to avoid the spreading of the virus, hand washing, hand washing, hand washing,
including the controversial mask. The following by Leora
Horwitz, associate professor of population health and medicine at NYU Langone
Health regarding spreading of the virus:
What are masks
good for, then? First, they are crucial for people who have the disease.
Remember those drops of saliva? Wearing a mask if you're sick can help catch a
large number of them, greatly reducing the amount of virus that gets into the
environment or onto other people. Second, they help health care workers, who
are constantly in close contact with lots of sick people coughing in their
faces, to avoid infection. Third, they may help you avoid infection if you live
with someone who has the disease or, perhaps, if you live in an area with a
very high rate of disease in the community, as long as you are careful not to
touch your face more because of it.
Wearing a mask
is not a big deal and it says how much empathy we have for the elderly, the
chronically sick or our very small contribution to control the spreading of the virus.
