‘If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.’
Coco Chanel
Flying is one of the dreams that people recall with great satisfaction when they wake from sleep. It’s a thrilling sensation and sometimes the Peter Pan vibe can stay with us all day. In a year when our wings feel as if they have been clipped both personally and professionally, never has that dream been more exciting with its sense of change, freedom and escape. Travel! Lunch with friends! Even a business meeting with colleagues drinking coffee and sharing ideas and ambitions seems such a goal.
We will of course hold sadness for those loved ones lost in the sudden and shocking pandemic of 2020. We will always carry respect for all key workers who risked their lives for us, including those industrious academics worldwide innovating incredible vaccines that might have taken decades to perfect in the past. The human brain, the ability to adapt, fight and completely readjust position in the face of threat, is truly remarkable. Every element of human resilience and character was on show last year, including kindness, an appreciation of nature, obedience when it was necessary to save lives, even if it led to enormous sacrifice.
Are we flying yet? 2021 is new and shiny of course but there is ‘hope’ written on the first page. Most of all, such a seismic change in our personal and professional day-to-day life requires a recalibration. Not flying, but a fluttering, a strategic nesting and checking the wings are in order, metaphorically speaking.
Business and the pursuit of industry has in particular had a Goliath hand weighing it down, with jack-in-in-box closures, lockdowns, restrictions, numbers clipped by social distancing and so forth. Sitting at home, trying to juggle a domestic environment and the demands of work – for both sexes – can be soul-destroying. Creatives in particular have had to find different streams of revenue.
Yet contrary to popular media reports, staying at home has not been all about baking sour dough and playing a mandolin badly. For many, it has been about finding the space to innovate, or consider where their small or burgeoning company might be heading, whether simply being an employee is enough. After all, those scribbled fashion designs or ideas for a gap in the food/drink/technology market may be actually quite good. It may be time to work for yourself and mould an incredible idea just when everyone is saying goodbye to Covid and wanting to live a vibrant, active life again. It’s the time to get some advice and guidance on those plans that are like jumping beans in your brain. Never has there been a better opportunity to start thinking about the future and the fun of creating something that is yours and will create a legacy. Now there will always be a desire for a much-needed fun to equate to iconic, bespoke fashion, or practical things to make people’s life easier.
2021 is still a work in progress but it is time to dream of flying. We have been earth bound much too long.
‘A power of Butterfly must be
The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of Sky –’
Emily Dickinson
Read our previous blog post here.
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