Years come and go. But these past two years have come with experiences only unique to them. Most especially because of the pandemic, a lot has changed in life; the routines that most of us were used to are gone and we have had to adjust to the new normal.
Alix Keza, a sales and marketing officer, says this year came with a lot of experiences, most of which she describes as positive. "I would say a lot of things shaped my life in 2021, starting from the coronavirus pandemic that led me to start my first year of university with an online course. Over time, I met a number of people and I learned to function in a society where I can do more than one thing at a time; I can be in class but at the same time be at work, or I can be at work and at the same time I am out with friends and this sense of omnipotence that the online field gave us is one I am grateful for,” she says.
Keza also notes how she has met so many people from so all walks of life yet with all this, she is proud of the fact that she managed to do so many potential things regardless of being cut off socially (because of the pandemic). "This happened because of the curfews and the limitations that came with the pandemic until I discovered an online world through Tik Tok.
With it, even though somebody was a million miles away, I could still see a piece of their life, and that in itself helped me grow mentally because I was just limited to the social culture that I was used to. But I could see and interact with other people who come from completely different backgrounds and nurture myself in ways that would have seemed improbable early on,” she adds.
Pascal Ntaganda, a TV presenter, says this year has left him with lessons around his personal and career life. He says he has come to understand that living life without a clear plan can make it hard for one to achieve anything. "Understanding where my life needs to be is crucial. It makes my life easy but also, gives me a clear path of where I want to be in terms of investing every day. Being here enabled me to see this; I never had clear goals about my personal life which made it hard. Living like this makes everything you touch move with the wind,” he says.
Professionally, Ntaganda says he learned certain values he didn’t attach much importance to in the past. "I learned that being at work with no contract literally equals to not being at work. Because at the end of the day, when it comes to your privileges people keep on compromising on what and when they should give you and everything. It also doesn’t give you a guarantee that you are working with somebody who respects or values you,” he says. "And faith wise, I learned to be authentic and not pretend to be who I’m not,” Ntaganda adds.
Othniel Pilipili, an entrepreneur, engineer, and systems builder shares that as an entrepreneur, unexpected business challenges faced during 2020 shaped his life and his approaches when designing business strategies. Some of the challenges include business cash-flow, unhappy clients, business model change, and unfinished product and service structure.
His life in 2021 included a sense of urgency and high-quality output in regards to his goals so that his full self will survive any future scenarios in time, he highlights. In 2021, Pilipili moved to another city where he has been staying for almost six months. This move has taught him new perspectives, exposed him to new experiences, and guided his life interpretation patterns, as he shares.
"For instance, it has become amazing to experience subcultures within one country. It is full of lessons to feel like a foreigner in one’s own country. This has shaped my life to consider cultural relativity at its fullest even when dealing with a single nation. At the core, people living under the same national roof have had different experiences that have shaped their lives to result in different, even opposing perspectives. This new experience has shaped my cultural considerations when dealing with diversity in a single country,” he says.
The pandemic on the other hand is still giving lessons for the engineer. He recalls when he heard aboutCovid-19 for the first time. He had just come from Egypt and was at his apartment in Accra, Ghana.
"All the newspapers were covering the story on how the virus just broke out in Wuhan. While with a colleague, I thought out loud; "imagine if this virus spread to more than 100countries. This could force a two-week global lockdown. Not cool. Well, here we are, almost two years later.”
Living in 2021 under the rules of Covid-19 shaped his priorities where every component is not taken for granted. Today Covid-19 forced remote work and most people are considering having their businesses entirely online such as Instagram, Zoom, etc. "On my side, my life has been shaped to consider a scenario where there is an ‘electronic Covid’, a virus that could attack most if not all websites that exist on the internet. What if this happened? "Given Covid-19, I have completely understood that my life should be either multifaceted enough through having multiple yet unrelated skills, or situation-proof so that I can survive any environment,” Pilipili says.