This will pass, too!

Today my sister-in-law sent me a story that had been written by one of her colleagues. It is about a king, who was in big trouble once and the sentence in the title helped him get through the difficult situation. When he overcame the problems and was very happy, he realised that the same sentence should be kept in mind even then.

Up and down, yin and yang – everything is changing and in the long run there is some kind of balance. In the last few years every autumn, when making business plans, we talked about the impossibility of things being good and well all the time, saying that sooner or later something bad will happen. Obviously we didn’t think it was going to be this bad.

After the very successful last year everyone was on cloud nine and the market didn’t even slow down after Christmas. Then something happened and retail has basically already done this year’s Christmas sales-wise due to the stockpiling…but everyone knew this was just cheap make-believe and the many smiles are always followed by tears.

Whether they admit it or not, people are afraid and they are working from home. They are afraid of the pandemic reaching them or their loved ones. Nobody knows whether it will take weeks or months for the situation to improve. Even though at Skype meetings every problem seems solvable, people are afraid because they don’t know about the situation of their company, what about production, storage, logistics – how long can the management keep things running this way?

Well, here I am sitting in my home office, just like all of my colleagues. We have decided to organise our events scheduled for the first half of the year online, and some of them we had to cancel. Trade magazine issues are likely to come out at later dates than originally planned. A few weeks from now we will start organising the Business Days conference, hoping that by September everything will be alright, to the extent that we can meet safely and discuss the things we went through. This will pass, too, I am sure about that – all we need to do is hold on!

Zsuzsanna Hermann, Editor in Chief