If you look this expression up on Wikipedia, you will find that it is actually considered more of a curse than a blessing.
It is an ironic expression which actually comes to say that uninteresting times of peace and tranquility are actually better to live in but I say, what’s interesting about that?
peace and tranquility are a boring routine
When you think of it, life could be really a boring routine. Not too many challenges in our everyday life today and everything just seems to be uninspiring.
Since childhood, I’ve always envied my grandparents’ stories. Although life was very difficult for them back then (all my grandparents experienced the horrors of WWII first hand being of jewish descent coming from eastern european countries), they were more than just stories, they were challenges, lessons for life, something to pass on to the children.
We don’t have that today!
Challenges build strength and growth
As humans we hardly ever learn from other peoples’ experience. We mostly learn from our own life experience and our life experience is what enables our personal growth and resilience.
The world we live in today (coming from a western democracy) was about as boring as it gets when it came to personal experiences.
And I even got to serve in the Israeli army!
Then came along the year 2020
I’m guessing that most people will call the year 2020 anything but interesting.
I found the year 2020 to be a new type of challenge, a new set of experiences, something that you know how you get into but not how you will be on the other side.
For me it finally feels like living in interesting times!
The ability to accept the challenge and overcome
My grandma Lucia (my mother’s mom) had the most amazing story about her life during WWII. She was a 20 something year old woman who was caught by the Nazis and sent to a labor camp. She managed to escape the labor camp and lived in hiding for the rest of the war.
She is not alive anymore but if you were to hear her story, you would think she was reading it out of an adventure book.
The amount of resourcefulness she had to come up with in order to survive and stay alive seemed so unreal to me before March 2020.
It feels to me we’re there again, a type of war, a great challenge, and if you want to survive, you will have to become more resourceful, more knowledgeable, make split second decisions that will change your life forever.
Life may now be dangerous but I think this is the only way they are really worth living.
May you live in interesting times 🙂
