How are you today? That question, posed to almost anyone you meet in the course of a day, would have been met with a breezy reply as recently as two weeks ago. “Fine, and how are you?” might have been the answer then in a thousand different languages.

Today we should be ready for a lengthy reply, as the whole world over people have been challenged with changes in their daily lives that they were completely unprepared for. In the light of the Coronavirus and all its effects, many would find it hard to be breezy now.

So how ARE you, in real time, today? Most of us reading will know how your external conditions have changed – assuming you are living in a country where the virus has caused a lockdown, isolating every citizen in their own home. The streets are empty in London, Rome, less so now in Taipei as the Taiwanese response to the virus tells a different story. But none of us know how you are experiencing that extreme change on the inside. What new thoughts might you be having about your ability to keep your families, friends or businesses safe? Your own capacity for staying healthy, resilient, creative in the temporary prison of your home?

Maybe you are thinking actively about whose fault this crisis is? Or the role you have played yourself in the past to create the conditions in which a pandemic was waiting to happen? Or are you mostly grieving the snatching away of a careless, carefree life that it now seems impossible to return to? While at the same time, maybe, noticing small changes in yourself and others that feel good and right too. Long overdue changes, that help you connect to the idea of some good coming out of all of this?

For most of us, it’s all too new to be able to process well. Small rays of hope can be quickly extrapolated to conjure up great visions of transformation. But we all know there is no controlling the outcome: forces of all kinds are battling to own the post-Corona future already and none of us know who can win yet.

Even so, that doesn’t leave us powerless to influence the outcome or with no role to play. What we give our attention to now will allow some things to grow and others to fall away. Can we maintain our vigilance about the dangers of disaster capitalism – Naomi Klein’s shocking insights into how predatory business takes advantage of chaos to advance its own control over the economy? But at the same time, can we give energy and properly nurture better ways of acting – personally, socially, globally? Those new practices and ways of organising that will give us improved chances of long-term survival. Especially if those latter ways of acting are where we can experience our power better. Where we can grow and develop the sense of our own agency. This can range enormously for people in unpredictable ways.

This week a CEO of a company shared with us the relief she felt at being able to self-isolate because she could feel, directly, how it would impact the safety of her father living in another town. Not simply by replacing her usual visit with a regular Zoom call herself – something they both found surprisingly intimate. But also by modelling behaviour that others might copy: she had a new deep sense of what was effective. A different level of cause and effect.

Despite her power as a CEO, used to shaping other people’s consumer choices, that feeling of direct impact on other people’s well-being is one she hadn’t felt before. It was now making her think about the impact of her behaviour more generally. How getting on a plane to attend a conference – as she regularly does - impacts the lives of those already living on the front line of climate change. Directly.

A consultant friend shared how, already working from home, he noticed how much of his energy was being dissipated by his need to lead the battle on social media. To be the first to suggest a new response to the rapidly shifting reality and, as a result, how many new projects he’d initiated that he was now swamped by and unable to develop. Thinking about his energy this way has resulted in reconstructing his days: he’s giving less time to performing his role or seeking status and more to developing good ideas he initiated earlier. Collaborating with others to get stuff done. Less speed, more traction.

Much of this depends upon our ability to stay present to what’s going on, so that we can distinguish between what gives (and what takes away) our capacity for building a possible future. When we started The Daily Alternative in 2017, our aim was to draw attention away from a mainstream media that sustained the fear-driven, addiction-forming growth economy. A narrative that emphasises our powerlessness in the face of global forces.

Instead we have been focusing on the evidence that another reality is possible. We report the abundant stream of initiatives and innovations in the fields of human development, social development. But also the new relationship with global forces that becomes possible with fractal and network theory, cosmo-localism and the internet as a space – albeit a vulnerable space - for global conversation.

To some extent, it’s a new set of blinkers: the usual suspects – activists, social entrepreneurs, altruists – talking to each other, fully committed. But the boundaries of that are porous and we are always pushing outwards in the belief that diversity is the key to flourishing. Having said that, at any given time we need a steady focus, paying attention to what is there and could grow. In many ways, AUK has been a container for seeds – not unlike those you may now be trying to grow in a jar at home, in time for the planting season.

But even as we tend to them, we are watching out for the bad weather or poor conditions that threaten the seeds’ ability to take sprout. That might include the broader culture of the public space, especially the mainstream media headlines which do everything they can to shape the narrative of our shared experience. Constantly preparing us for a return to normal when the crisis is over.

And we know what business-as-usual looks like. It’s big business hoping for government bail outs that may put them in a better financial position than they were before the shut-down. It’s the growth economy getting ready to roar back with a vengeance, making up for the time lost and some. It’s security forces that have won new powers to control the public space that may later be used to shut down protests. Or more simply, it’s a new disconnect between people on the streets that can be exploited by the media or advertisers, to make us ever-more dependent on their products for relief.

Yet even in the mainstream news, other possibilities appear too. After a rocky initial response in which Boris Johnson put the economy before the health of the people, we are now seeing the very strange spectacle of the UK Tory government committing to socialist-like spending levels on public services. Especially the NHS, which they had allowed to fall into serious disrepair over the past ten years. We see the US government planning a switch to an emergency Universal Basic Income, putting $1700 in the pocket of every adult and a further $500 per child.

Can we ever un-see the money made available in this moment? Not a moment, we might add, that reveals a genuine risk to our survival for the first time: that risk is always present with the long-standing environmental catastrophe. But a moment in which the leaders have not been able to control the narrative, obscuring the truth and minimising the dangers. This is a moment when the truth tellers – scientists, the infected, care-workers – have used their soft power in social media to shout their warnings at the world. Large institutions and influential figures began self-isolating well before the government switched tactics.

Creative responses to the crisis on instagram

For a few days Boris Johnson moved into full Churchill mode, asking everyone to unite behind a national effort. Yet it seems this is not that moment: forced to self-isolate himself, Johnson’s authority has been re-distributed amongst a broader team. Watching Parliamentary questions last week, many remarked how purposeful the Commons had become.

More than a country uniting behind the leader, this seems to be a moment for the independent – and then inter-dependent - spirit to thrive. We are up for Covid Mutual Aid, it seems, more than follow-the-leader. We are observing huge waves of ordinary citizens self-organising to help the vulnerable in their communities (ref). Innumerable, creative initiatives for connecting on-line have arisen – from community choirs to cooking classes. What we have previously described as citizen action networks (CANs) – connecting all the people to the cosmo-local solutions to their physical and emotional needs – are now appearing everywhere.

After an initial panic-buying scrum, we have broken out into lots of ordered, thoughtful social distancing in supermarket queues and around the entrances to parks. Two nights ago, I was distracted by the sound of whooping and cheering outside – only to remember that it was the time people all over the world had agreed to applaud health workers. In many, surprising ways, our public space has been transformed.

Will all this amount to nothing in the aftermath of the Coronavirus? It’s easy to feel fatalistic and presume that, pretty soon, all the good stuff will be consigned to the bin of ‘wartime spirit’. Our heartfelt responses in a moment of threat, will be remembered only nostalgically.

On the other hand, we could decide not to wait at all but engage in this moment as if it is a gear change and we are at the wheel: we can decide where to go. Last December we brought together thirty key new-system actors: they were the blind wo/men feeling out the contours of the Elephant in the room. Together we hoped they might describe a new socio-economic-political system, capable of transforming the multiple crises we have been facing for decades.

In March we shifted our website from appearing only as a news channel to becoming an invitation to participation in the system we continue to describe. It’s early days, but with our co-creators we are slowly working out how to move into action.

We’re shifting from being a hugely diverse group of people with a shared purpose but competing agendas, to being a complex, integrated group of projects and actions that add up to change. It’s our vision that this can become a 4th sector political platform, generating both policy and a new kind of economy for those that take part.

Some people will think of this simply as optimism – a Polyanna’ish expectation that things will turn out well. But to us this feels like commitment: paying attention to the present moment at all times, noticing what seems possible and investing our energy in that.

Alternative Editorial: The Power of Noticing