It has been six weeks, six weeks since the beginning of the lockdown! We’re entering the month of May next week. Who would have ever thought that a virus could have such an impact on literally every corner of the World? Just as if someone had pressed “pause” on a remote control and everything stopped.
It is interesting to observe how things are changing with covid-19. Much of it for the worse, unfortunately, but there are also some positive sides to it in terms of expressions of solidarity and buying locally. Many see it as a test for our society and it will be interesting to see whether any of the habits we are obliged to adapt, such as staying at home more, avoiding commercial centres or other types of entertainment, not eating out etc., will remain once we’re back to normal. Only that it will not be the “old” normal…
You might have noticed yourselves how the work landscape has changed. In my case, it seems that the work-related email traffic has gone up like crazy and there are no “regular” work breaks. Which means lots of late night and early morning emails. Makes total sense because those with children around cannot really work in a focused manner from 9 to 6. Interestingly, webinars organised in these lockdown times have much more attendees than usual. One can sense that people crave company – even if only online.
Same as with schools, we still don’t know how the return will look like and when exactly it will happen, but most likely the gradual approach will involve rotation, increased use of technology, a lot of sanitary and physical distancing rules and hopefully much more understanding for telecommute.
On the home-schooling front, I tried some “laissez-faire” approach this week. This means supervising it only if my daughter had questions. I felt a bit nervous about it at first but ended up being proud as she managed to do most of it quite ok. Then there were of course some video calls to connect with the teachers scheduled at exactly the same time as those on the work front and the toddler wanting to be involved, but I have gotten used to it by now.
Despite being connected to my computer the whole day long, I still had a lot of work to do in the evenings. I begin to understand more and more all that “wellbeing tips for working from home” warning us from the pitfalls of burning out. A mixture of a webinar, kids’ videocall to their grandparents and emails made my head spin on Friday afternoon. Luckily the weekends have not been abolished (yet) 😉
The intermittent fasting is still on, regular exercise a bit less so and I have developed this terrible habit of going to bed too late and then feeling half dead when the little one is up shortly after 6 am. It probably has something to do with having to unwind after a stressful day but it is untenable to say the least.
To help me relax, there are still my good friend Netflix (albeit a bit too popular in corona times and often displaying error messages) and books. I had borrowed some good thrillers before our library closed down. I’m in the middle of the Gone Girl by G. Flynn – highly recommended, much better than the movie. And how are you?
