Some thoughts on our “post-pandemic” reality

Well. Here we are.

After 16 months, we’re pretty much on the other side of whatevertheheckthatwas.

And while it mostly feels like a gigantic relief, there’s a part of me that already feels nostalgic for pieces of what I was calling the Great Big Pause, especially those first few months. What a remarkable thing it was to have all the busy-ness of regular life simply stop. There was nowhere to be. The streets were quiet. Hardly any planes flew overhead. It was surreal. There were certainly a lot of question marks about the future, but for me, that often felt like an opportunity to stay in the present in a way that I’ve never really done before. 

Granted, I’m a married, white, middle class, empty-nester who did not have to help kids get through zoom school and seemingly endless hours of unstructured time. I had a roof over my head, enough food to eat, and the security of knowing that I would be relatively OK throughout. Not one single day went by that I didn’t feel enormous amounts of gratitude for all of this, and endless compassion for the teachers, single mothers, front line workers and all the countless others who had a very different experience.

But there were many of us who found ourselves with more free time than we’ve ever had in our lives. There was time to chill, time to create and time to reconnect and reflect in ways we haven’t for ages, if ever. There was time to cook, time to work out, time to do puzzles and time to bake banana bread. There was time to clean out closets, take daily walks, indulge in whims and curiosities and to fall into google rabbit holes. There was time to watch all the TV we wanted without an ounce of guilt that there was something else more important that we should be doing.

But just because “real life” is making a comeback, doesn’t mean we have to give all of that up!

I keep hearing people say that they don’t want to slip back into old patterns. We may be excited to go to movies, concerts, restaurants and airports again, but we also want to avoid being over scheduled, maxed out and going so fast that life becomes a blur. 

Perhaps this is an invitation to be more intentional with our time, our attention and our energy.

Change is the name of the game in life and if we’ve learned anything, it’s that things can change in an instant. We’ve lived through historic times.

What if here, in the ‘afterwards’, we get to decide which activities we want to keep doing and which ones no longer satisfy? What if a day of self-care is a day spent in sweatpants, baking banana bread and watching an entire season of The Gilmore Girls without “shoulding” ourselves? What if, going forward, we become more intentional about who we want to spend time with, realizing that we don’t have to put ourselves in social situations that make us feel drained or incomplete? What if we consciously go forward with the objective of less chaos and more presence? 

We have the power and the agency to influence decisions in every part of our lives.

Let’s not squander the opportunity to create a future (and a present!) that’s informed by the experience of the past.