Time to continue, time to change

One of the most salient lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic is our ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Customs and people who seemed to be essential for our survival proved not to be that necessary. It is not that the change has been easy, but it has been possible. We just needed the right amount of pressure, an incentive big enough: when your life or your livelihood is at stake, it is easy to make whatever renounce is necessary.

Conversely,  we have started doing things that we never thought we would do: from baking bread to knitting scarves, sewing patchwork, rolling on the floor with our kids. Some of us have even started to talk among us, whereas we just used to sit beside one another and stare at our cellphones.When your agenda is suddenly empty because your gym, your coffee shop and your favorite book store are all closed, you find yourself with a lot of time to fill, too many kids to take care of and too little options outside the house, so you just grow imaginative.

Photo: Marco Verch

However, the shelter-in-place policy not only has brought to light our chance capacity, but it has also turbocharged many of the aspects that were already in our lives: the good ones, which we did not have a chance to enjoy enough because we were rushing from one place to the other and now can be leisurely savored, and the bad ones, from which we used to hide in the daily haste and now are painfully obvious and inescapably present. Many couples whose relationship was on the brink have seen a final turn for worse during the lock-down because the extensive time together at home has shown them how incompatible they were with one another.

Finally, there is a third group of activities and customs that are neither new nor old, that have not been induced by the pandemic but also do not count with a long-standing status in your life. This is the case of the plans that started around the beginning of the pandemic, which were planned before all hell broke lose and which the lock-down has somehow spared. They can still be running, but under significantly different conditions from the original plan, so their present situation is not a good indicator of how things would have turned up without the pandemic.

The situation seems to be turning up, but there is still no saying when everyday life will resemble the one we had in 2019. Extraordinary events, such as business trips and holiday trips will probably take even longer to go back to normal, and some pundits are already predicting a revival of "the roaring 20s" once we are out of the hole and everybody realizes that they have been working too hard, saving too much, waiting too long, aiming too high; that life can be upended in a matter of seconds or days and all those efforts would have been for nothing; that there is no guarantee that you will eventually have an opportunity to harvest on all your efforts, so it is important to cash in some of your payoffs on a regular basis.

So, what to do with the things that we do not like today? Shall we just wait until life is somewhat normal before we take action and thereby deplete our last reservoir of resistance? Or shall we induce a change in the middle of an already turbulent situation, where any change will be way harder than under normal circumstances? I do not have an answer, but I have things that I would like to change, so I will have to keep looking for a solution, and I will tell you what my conclusion is once I reach it. In the meantime, have a nice weekend and I will see you on Monday.