It’s Okay to Pause…
Taking this time to reflect instead of distract.
A New Normal…
Quarantine Log #32: I’ve been home for the past 32 days — short of my occasional visits to the great outdoors (my backyard) and the grocery store, with its assembly line of mouthless, masked shoppers shuffling along with the arrows on the floor like a conveyor belt. I miss my family and friends. I know you’re technically allowed to see them now but that risk, for me, is just far too great. This seems to be the new normal.
That’s the way that most days are now. Teetering on the edge of optimism and utter paranoia about what the future holds. On one hand, it seems that most of the world has gotten a handle on how best to approach the COVID-19 crisis, with positive news eschewing from most major news outlets across the globe every other day. It seems like we collectively may be starting to beat this thing. On the other hand, death tolls continue to rise, local businesses continue to be forced into bankruptcy, and a quick glance outside serves as a reminder that we must remain pent up.
This is an unprecedented, anxiety-inducing time. Not only for those who experience mental illness — ironically enough, a lot of us seem to be thriving during this uncertain time — but for the world as a whole. The day-to-day changes accompanying the overhanging cloud of doom around what will happen to ourselves and those close to us is enough to send even the most stoic of individuals into a tizzy.
So why are we pretending everything is fine?
It’s Okay to Pause…
There is a time to put a brave face on and to grit your teeth, but I think that ship has sailed. If we don’t consider this to be the ethereal wake-up call that it is, I fear we’ll lose a lot more than our favourite pubs in the aftermath.
This is an opportunity to finally be real, vulnerable, and accountable to one another, and it is being cast aside at an alarming rate. We continue to churn out curated, emotionless content about the ways we’re thriving, or crushing our goals, or learning to bake. It’s filler. It’s noise. It’s a shield we place in front of our pysches that hold our most private fears and worries — hoping that someone will break through and ask us how we’re really feeling. Ask us how we manage to fall asleep at night knowing that our lives could be sent into a tailspin the following day. Ask us what we’ve found that gets us through this worry and this pain and this anger.
It’s okay to pause right now. It’s okay to use this time, not to learn something new or to log more billables, but to really take stock of the space around us. When shit hits the fan — and it has — what around you brings even an ounce of comfort or solace? Is it the people, the relationships we’ve built that transcend a 2-meter physical distancing radius? Is it other living things, like our plants or our pets? Or is it just things? The clothes, the car, the “stuff”? Understanding what gets us by during these uncertain times is crucial to knowing what truly makes us happy and what we need to hold close.
What Do You NEED?
We’ve been inundated with ads and influencers trying to tell us what we need right now. It’s one of the first rules of business and marketing: every situation can be an opportunity. But I think what we need right now has to come from us. We must figure out what that looks like for ourselves, and the only way to do that is to truly pause and sit with our thoughts and our feelings in order to work with them; not to stifle them and drown them in more, more, more. With the outside world being physically off-limits, the last thing we should be trying to do is downloading the entire outside world into our homes. We still need boundaries. We still need space.
I urge all of us to take any extra time we’re given to really look around at where we are, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. If it doesn’t feel right, maybe it’s time for a change. I want us all to come out of this quarantine, not with a new skill or sourdough starter, but with a deeper understanding of where to go next.
