Myopic

Which means short-sighted, unimaginative, narrow-minded.

One of the challenges of this year is we have a hard time imagining a world where things are different again. Sometimes we call this the “new normal.”

Except things will most surely be different going forward.

The pandemic has only started to unlock the potential of video conferencing. Many will be asking when this is all over why am I going back to the office? Why spend all this money on rent? What does this mean for schools?

And we certainly can see that for too long we have made short-sighted decisions for our systems to be efficient rather than resilient. That can’t continue forever.

The thing is, we are myopic by nature. Because of the story we tell ourselves. Because we are focused on us, the here, the now.

And with sensory overload every time we turn on our phone or email or laptop to be more informed, it’s easy to say, “This is someone else’s problem or “This is too messy to clean up.”

We can’t imagine a world of new possibilities when we are stuck with the same patterns. The same choices are likely to bring the same results.

The chance then we have to take is making different choices. But different choices means change. What if it doesn’t work? Well, thats what happens when we refuse to make the difficult choice early.

Does delaying difficult decisions ever get easier the longer we wait?