Discovering Prague Plague Columns
We are certainly living in difficult and challenging times. Who could imagine when we were welcoming this new year 2020 what direction our lives would turn… the world is involved in this corona challenge, but we have to go through all this also individually and it depends on every single one of us whether we look at this challenge in a positive or only in a negative way… it is always hard to see the light in what looks like complete darkness, but I tend to be the naive optimist and I believe that there is always at least little flash of light in every situation…
Looking back in history we can see that even our predecessors went through many terrible plagues and epidemics. As a reminder of those hard days, on many European squares there are so called “plague columns”. Sometimes such a column was built still during the epidemic to pray to God for help, or after the epidemic was over to thank God for sparing their lives.
Today, we have these beautiful pieces of art reminding us of the dark times… here are few examples of plague columns built in my hometown – Prague…
These epidemics in our history were usually local ones, spreading around some European countries, sometimes in a bigger scale, sometimes involving just a few regions, but this time we are all going through the same story – around the whole world we have to fight the same virus, we have to fight our fears, we have to deal with our mistakes and face the same challenges.
I believe this time we have a chance when it´s all over not to step back to the same “before corona” footsteps, but to use it as an opportunity for our personal “reset”, a reset of our local community, an opportunity to be more involved in different important changes (in my neighborhood we are already discussing the possibility of closing some streets for cars completely to make the streets more livable, or use new impulses from 2,5 months of home-schooling to make the education system work better). We could reset our political culture and learn from all the mistakes that were made and focus on the next elections, reset the society itself – should we call it then “the big planetary reset”?… I hope we can and we will!
What would your “corona column” look like? Let´s individually put together few things you want to remember and change in the future, so we could use this reset in the best possible way even for our self-improvement…
“May the force be with us…” 😊