A collage of my Post-COVID future

At SonicRim we have followed one tradition that was started by the founders of the company 22 years ago. In late 1998 five of us, then working at Fitch, decided to start our own design research company. The planning process involved several weeks of daily conversations running into late nights about “why we are doing this?” Finally as we began to gain clarity, we decided that each of the team members would make a collage expressing her/his personal aspirations in life and how they see forming of SonicRim might serve as a vehicle to move towards fulfilling those aspirations. From having used collage technique with the participants of research studies we regularly conducted we knew that collage making can be a cathartic experience. That exercise helped four of the five team members discover a shared purpose in SonicRim, whereas one team member realized that her priorities lay elsewhere.

Since then, for the last 22 years, we have asked most of the people joining SonicRim to make a collage of their personal aspirations, so that we could have deeper conversations with them about whether SonicRim was the right vehicle to progress towards that dream.

Yesterday we met to share each of our collage of our aspirations from life and from our job. We could see some very interesting influence of how COVID-19 is forcing us to seek clarity and purpose- in our collages.

Some of the common elements of our aspirations as revealed from the sharing of the collages was:

1. Work is a part of life and therefore the focus should be on living life meaningfully rather than on career aspirations. Each of us found it difficult to separate our expectations from work from our aspirations for life.
2. Building a community that serves as a support and resource for purposeful living.
3. Eliminating commute from getting to work: we do not want to congest city streets with traffic.
4. Freeing up city streets for community interactions and celebration of life.
5. Devoting time to nurture and harness family resources as a source of life.
6. Finding opportunities to learning more and evolving - not just earning more and letting our soul erode while serving the demands of grueling work life.

Here I share my own collage. I hope it will inspire you to make your own. When I started making my collage, I started with a black background to denote Post-COVID future as a beginning of a new life from a black hole. As I started putting clusters and layers of images and words into my collage, I began to recognize the significance of the current time we live in. We must use this time to examine our inner calling, set priorities, make hard choices and force those in positions of power to listen to the voice of our collective conscience. We need to form communities within organizations and in the wider world, that help us assert our desire to make living meaningfully a priority. We need not continue working like slaves to serve an economy that is focused more on consuming than on conserving.

At the very top of my collage is a view of sunrise on earth as seen from the space. Metaphorically, it represents to me the beginning of a new future as visible from a dark present. The eye at the center of my collage represents my inner eye. It invites me to search the depth of my conscience. On top of that eye, sits a small image of Buddha- reminding me along the way to never lose my curiosity and the ability to question. I need to create participatory mechanisms for helping people contribute their ideas and be inspired by the insights and ideas from friends who share their values. A lot of ideas kept surfacing in my awareness as I let my hand keep building layers upon layers of images and words. The book of poems I published last month and the next book of musings “Design of life and Life’s Design” I am working on occupy an important space in my collage. They represent my belief that poetry and story telling are two powerful tools with which we can invite people to share their imagination of a purposeful future.

I encourage you to try building a collage, accept your vulnerabilities and let your dreams guide your resolve for re-imagining a post-COVID future for yourself.