We Bottomed Out, Forced to Drift.
There are times in life when we experience some real hardship. Sometimes we experience it on our own, and sometimes as a nation. The Pandemic of 2020 was certainly a shared hardship. No matter which side of the coin you were on, believing in it or not, many lives were lost. Lives in fact now are still being lost. There were days, weeks and months that we wondered if we would ever get out of it. If we would ever be able to move around freely, visiting family and friends, traveling…going to the coffee shop without a mask. It wreaked havoc on those already experiencing anxiety, increased depression and contributed to an epidemic of self medicating, to name just a few…and even now, many are still in the throes of a curveball that has us walking with a bit of a limp.
Forced to drift. And think.
Yet I was raised under a shiny yellow umbrella that gave me hope: Of bad things, good things come. If we can be intentional in our search, we will see it with our very own eyes.
The pandemic is no different. If we look beyond moments of grief and all that was lost, some amazing things have happened. Some families learned that they actually enjoyed being hunkered down with each other. Some had the chance to relearn simple things like learning to paint, play an instrument or even enjoy an extravagant puzzle. Time, was on our side. For some that was torture, but also for many, time became divine intervention.
At first it seemed like the millennials experienced it in the most dramatic way. The 20-something year olds that were making gobs of money while working 50-60 hours/week, were began to see what they had been missing. I mean, if you are working more than you are home, how can you possibly know what you are missing? Yet once forced to be still, life began to look more like a kaleidoscope…with colors and angles and perspectives that they almost forgot were available. Perhaps ones they had never seen before.
In my family alone, all of my sisters ‘kids’ who were enormously successful in their careers in NYC, decided to spend more time in their childhood home in Long Beach, NY. I mean, why not? They were all working from home and at least in Long Beach, with the sand just a few steps away, they could safely go outside whenever they wanted. As a matter of fact, what started as a few long weekends, became a sort of permanent-temporary living situation.
They were all quietly tickled. Who needs a water cooler or Starbucks when you have a party sized coffee urn brewing every morning in the kitchen? Truckloads of food deliveries from Costco took care of everything else and pretty quickly, nightly family dinners, which had long passed a decade ago…were back! I remember talking to my sister each morning, nearly whispering about her joy. At first, it seemed like joy was something that should be kept secret. This was a pandemic after all. How could we be experiencing such joy? I suppose knowing it was temporary, helped to keep it in perspective.
I remember clearly listening to my nephew, with a successful career in finance saying that no matter what happened, this would not become the norm. They would never be able to carry on remotely. No one would allow it. Too many clients to see. Travel mattered. In person was the only way.
And while I heard him, I wondered how anyone was going to be able to put this back in the bottle. How could we now unsee this? How could we go back to the way it was, spending hours of time traveling to the next job, not having time to even sit and eat a meal, and pretend it felt normal? For sure it would feel familiar, but normal?
The pandemic called into question everything we believed about normal.
People hired Life Coaches and Business Coaches to help them redirect the thinking and doing. We had time now. Business was slow. Commutes were eliminated. We were feeling nervous about the Pandemic, yet at peace with ourselves. Now it was time to do some short term fine-tuning, so that in a few weeks, when all was back to normal, we could start again with a fresh perspective and a laser focused attitude.
We had time. And we were floating along.
At first it felt like a guilty pleasure. The idea of a staycation without having to use your vacation time. Then it felt a little dreamy. Busily working during the work hours and using the down time to do things you didn’t normally do. Things you didn’t have time for previously.
Meditation. After dinner strolls. Relearning to cook. Extended time at the table long after the food was gone. Amidst the sadness and fear of what was occurring outside our doors, there was some intense and long overdue joy. There was stillness.
We had even more time.
Our family began to use the new school calendar to gauge how much more time we had. First it was 2 weeks, and I thought, hmmmm, this will be interesting. Two weeks. What will we do to entertain ourselves? It then turned into a month, and i thought, that’s a long time. But then again, two weeks seemed to pass so quickly without nightly runs to practices, friends houses, or meetings. By the time the schools had declared we would wait it out until the end of summer, it just made sense. Summer vacation for everyone! Except that we still couldn’t actually go anywhere.
I remember making a decision one day to check on our beach house and how nervous I was. There were rumors about being stopped on the bridge. Did I need a note from someone proving I was going to my second home? Would I have to turn around? Would I get covid even though I wasn’t going to see anyone? Mostly, though, I felt torn between the guilt of going out and the joy of feeling free.
Stay home, they said.
After 2 months, people were growing tired of being home. Frustrated. Feeling trapped. Needing something else to do. Someone other than family to see. Yearning for a gathering.
For myself, the longer it went on, the cozier I got. It was like finding out there was a snow day. No fear of missing out, since everyone else was stuck inside too. It was safe. Comfy. No shoes needed. No guilt about needing to be productive. It was a snow day, right? For a while, anyway. Pretty soon those feelings transformed into relief. I was reminded of how much I valued family time and how much I enjoyed simply being home.
I wasn’t alone in this either. The Millennials and Gen Z began the Great Resignation, while the Boomers were experiencing the Great Reflection. Pay was the number one reason the younger generation were leaving their jobs, but it was followed up by the belief that the workplace was detrimental to their health.
We had seen the unthinkable. Shut downs, unexpected deaths, and almost a complete halt. Also, we saw pretty quickly that in many professions, you could skip the commute and work from the bedroom or makeshift office. On top of that, we couldn’t unsee the value in life when able to spend more time at home, with family, loved ones…while surely many were experiencing a new kind of stress with this unknown pandemic, many others had a decrease in stress due to being able to control just how the work day looked.
The genie had come out of the bottle. And it would not go back in easily. If at all.
Although the Great Resignation and the Great Reflection weren’t exactly the same, they sure had similarities. People wanted more flexibility, to be surrounded by a positive environment and a yearning for a sense of meaning. It didn’t matter whether they were searching for that in the next job or in retiring completely, it was about looking life right in the eyes and asking, Is this really what I want to be doing every day?
In my opinion, I think we should always be looking at our life like that. I mean, it is our life. So why wouldn’t we want to design it that way? The answer to that is just as simple.
We get so wrapped up in the way it is, the way we are used to, the normalcy of the current day to day, that we just don’t bother looking at it through a different lens. This is the script. This is my lens. And this is how we sail along. Until the bottom of the boat breaks out, and we are forced to find a way other than one oar at a time.
Perhaps that’s the good that has come from this horrific Pandemic. We bottomed out. Emotionally, physically, spiritually…and without any oars, we had some time to drift and think. Then we had an opportunity to look at what would be next. And that is the part that can make the difference…
Because as you know, if you change one thing. It can change everything.