So today’s Wednesday, April 15. Though it’d be hard to tell that by looking out into my yard today, with the fresh dump of snow we received overnight.
Seriously, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that we’d skipped a couple of seasons, flipped summer and fall the bird, and just headed straight back to winter.
Seemingly, we’re due more snow up this way next week, too. So… yeah, huzzah. Though, to be fair, this was a big reason for us leaving the large city we were living in, and heading three hours north.
Peace. Silence. Proper winters. I just didn’t expect the amount of peace we’d be experiencing due to COVID-19. Then again, did any of us?
I Remember Weekdays
Our kids finished up school for March Break on Friday, March 13 (damn, how ominously predictive that superstitious date turned out to be, eh?).
Turns out that was essentially the first day of quarantine and lockdown, as COVID-19 started to really hit hard globally, following disastrous and tragic numbers coming in from Asia.
Based on expert medical advice and leadership, the provincial and federal governments here in Canada started mandating stay-at-home policies, to try and reduce/slow the spread of this horrible virus.
Four weeks later, there’s no end in sight, and we could be looking at the school year being finished for 2020, and not returning until the new school year in September, if even then.
And, I’ll be honest, I’m completely at the point of I don’t even know what day it is anymore sometimes.
Between trying to help the kids stay up to date with some form of education from the stuff teachers are sending via email and online courses, to trying to keep the house running, and looking for freelance/consulting work with my full-time job being canned, the days have just blended into one big passage of time.
When the kids ask what day it is – because we still need to have some form of organization – I genuinely have to ask Google Home, or check my phone.
And it freaks me out, how quickly we can lose sense of time, place, and – to a degree – purpose when all the things we know are no longer there.
But then… Then I take pause, and think. And acknowledge.
Normality is What We Make It
For the longest time, we’ve been programmed to work to the normality of procedure, determined by people we’ll never meet and who have little to zero connection to us.
We’ve been told we need to work a certain way; learn a certain way; live a certain way. And when you don’t know any better, you don’t question this approach.
It’s just the way it is. Except it’s not.
Because, as this pandemic has shown many people, the way things have been up ’til now don’t necessarily have to be the way things will be moving forward.
When we return to whatever future normality looks like, there’s going to be a lot of questions about the way we lived and worked before.
- The excuse that your job can’t be done from home
- The definition of essential workers (hint: it’s not stockbrokers and hedge fund managers)
- The importance of structured education versus life education
- The greed of the few versus the needs of the many
We have an opportunity to revise and redesign the mistakes in priorities that we’re – hopefully – questioning now. Or, we can simply revert to how it was before we lost the freedom to do that shit.
This new normality will be what we make it. How are you going to choose?