Tomorrow evening marks the 10 week anniversary of the announcement of the “New Normal”, shutdown, lockdown, quarantine, call it what you want. Here we are 69.5 days later. I will always wonder what would have happened, or not happened, if we had just gone about our ordinary lives. The spread of the virus is inevitable. Did slowing the spread down make a difference?
At the start of the “New Normal”, no one was really sure what we should do. I went into it all with a positive mindset, “thrive rather than simply survive”. I am coming out of all of this with a positive mindset. Despite a positive mindset, I am not okay with what transpired over the last 69.5 days. I am not okay with the shutting down of our economy; I am not okay with the loss of our freedoms, and I could write an entire book on the stupidity of “Facebook police”.
My positive mindset does not stem from an acceptance of what has happened, rather it stems from all that I have learned in the past 69.5 days.
Above all, I have re-learned what the Marine that raised me taught me, how important our freedom is. A sense of terror raises within my heart when I think about how easily we all gave up our freedom on day one of the “New Normal”. I so easily followed suit. I cannot change that. I admit that I needed a “time out” in life. Not a 69.5 day time out. Just a few days to stop and think about it all. Giving up one’s freedom and taking a time out in life are two entirely different ideals. So here we have –
Lesson 1 – I will never take my freedom for granted again.
Lesson 2 – Every year for the rest of my life, I will do what I have been planning to do for more than a decade, and that is taking a “time out”. I will spend a couple of days at home with the boys; not leaving the house at all, and then I will spend a couple of days traveling, with just me. I will take time out to reflect and think about all that is happening in my life.
I have learned that I am not alone in life. One would think that having spent the last 69.5 days almost entirely alone with just my boys and my fur kids that I would feel alone. To the contrary, the last 69.5 days have taught me that there are so many people that are there for me. There are those, I already knew were there, and then those that I did not fully appreciate until this all happened.
Lesson 3 – God has blessed my boys and I with incredible people that truly care about us.
I always thought that I could not stand being at home. To the contrary, I love being at home. I am not sure what exactly I had to overcome to appreciate being at home, but I have done so.
Lesson 4 – Home sweet home. I will always be home much more often than I was before. I like quiet evenings at home. I like cooking at home.
That said, now that I do not eat a meal out at least once a day, I REALLY enjoy dining out.
Lesson 5 – Let dining out be a treat, rather than an everyday way of life.
I miss traveling, and I deeply miss Canada.
Lesson 6 – Appreciate what I have in life rather than taking it for granted. I had such a cool life prior to the “New Normal”. I got to travel for work, and dine out and meet lots of new people. I definitely liked all of this, but I took it for granted. I miss my life prior to the “New Normal”, and I will never again take what I have for granted.
In lieu of traveling, I have been at home, 90% of the time that I have been at home, I have been with my boys. We love our time together as a family. There are not words to express how amazing our time has been together during all of this. I learned so much about them, which I would have thought I already knew…
Lesson 7 – Little Chirp is an incredibly good student. Not that I doubted him before, but seeing him in action everyday during home school was eye opening. He has true self-discipline. He enjoys learning, and he puts structure into each day; this structure does not need to be forced upon him. He REALLY wants to make the basketball team in 7th grade. I knew that he liked basketball, but I had no idea how much this matters to him until now.
Lesson 8 – Brainy Bird is always busy learning something, but he hates that something being dictated to him. If he is interested in a subject; he will spend his own time learning more. I saw this play out day in and day out. He would finish an assignment that interested him, and then he would be reading more about the topic on reddit or Wikipedia at the expense of not getting the rest of his work done. The rest of his work being Spanish 4.
Lesson 9 – Brainy Bird is more of a typical teenager than I thought. He put on a good face on most days, but he deeply missed going to school and seeing his friends. He did not hear from some of his friends during all of this, and he was visibly bothered by it. Like most kids his age, Brainy Bird is trying to make sense of all that is going on in the world, and he is not sure what to think. Not being sure what to believe in causes him a great deal of stress.
Speaking of trying to make sense of it all, I got to know some folks better thanks to their Facebook posts. Some of my favorites are the guy sitting fat and happy, posting his expensive wine on his page everyday that let us all know that he gave the pizza delivery guy a $20 tip. According to his post, he was letting us all know that we should appreciate delivery service. He also shamed the women that was arrested in Dallas for reopening her hair salon, yes he clearly understands what this is like for us all. He is married to a doctor, so I am not sure he appreciates what it is like to depend on every paycheck; he is also the married guy that I saw kissing a woman and disappearing with her into a hotel room at a conference a few years back.
There is also the stay at home mother that got a medical degree in the past 69.5 days, at least I assume that is what gave her the qualifications to be so vocal about staying at home and wearing a mask in public. I could be confused. Maybe this was just an easy conviction for someone that did not work in the first place that has a husband with a government job that is not impacted by the shutdown of our economy. Maybe….
Lesson 10 – There are people that are unable to understand or appreciate anything beyond themselves. They are committed to finding information that supports their narrow minded view of the world, and the only thing that one can do is just let it be.
Yoga…
Lesson 11 – Yoga is amazing, and it makes the people from lesson 10 more tolerable.
On a much more positive front, I love the little neighborhood where I live. Prior to all of this, I would go for a run at 5 AM, and rarely see anyone. Over the last 69.5 days, I have gotten to know so many of my neighbors. Many of them are people that I already knew. I just did not know that they live where they live. My neighborhood is filled with amazing kids, grown ups, dogs and cats. I finally met the few neighbors that I have with adjacent property to mine, and they all have one thing in common – they have seen my fur kids out and about, and they adore them.
Lesson 12 – I love my hood. I am beyond blessed to live where I live.
This is just a bit of all that I have learned in the past 69.5 days. I truly have a new outlook on life that is never going to fade. As I said in my post earlier today, it is easy to live in a bubble, sheltered from all that is wrong around me. That is not how I plan to live; I am deeply aware of how much pain the “New Normal” has caused our country, but I choose to tackle it all with a positive mindset. One small change, some small impact with each day.
It is the little things in life.