When the world suddenly shut up shop in March, there was mass surprise from people everywhere about how easy it was to strip our lives bare of the activities in which many of us had felt irrevocably entangled. The whirl of meetings and sports sessions and social events and dance rehearsals that had become the scaffolding of every week … sometimes for years, was gone, in an instant.
In place of that scaffolding? White space. Blank calendars. Silence.
We were still working, if we were lucky. Many of us were doing so while children ‘home schooled’ under our feet. We were separated from loved ones. And we had an assortment of cancelled plans and travels which brought varying degrees of pain and chaos.
But amidst the stressful, unwanted turmoil, a new whisper of ease was creeping in. Maybe we could set our alarms a little later. We could make our morning walks a little longer. We could breathe.
Without somewhere we needed to be, and indeed with strict instructions not to go anywhere — a lot of us settled, after a while, into new rhythms. For some, even against a backdrop of worry and uncertainty and grief, many these lockdown rhythms weren’t wholly unwelcome.
And now, with the picture disassembled and spread out on the table in front of us in pieces, it seems we’re allowed to let pieces of life back in. But which pieces go where? What if we rush, and mess up this one chance of a reset on lives that were set on too fast a speed before this happened?
It’s okay.
If there’s anything we’ve learnt through this crisis, it’s that the way we live our lives is largely a construct of our own making. It’s something we can undo at any time. Those activities we sign ourselves and others up for can be undone. Commitments can be let go. You can say no. Almost everything is a choice.
So, as you begin to plan your reentry into the world — whether you’re dancing back into things or hanging back a little longer, remember nothing you choose to do will be set in stone. We’ve been given this magical knowledge now.
We are not trapped.
We’re not hopelessly entangled.
There’s always a way out.
And there is always enough time for the things that matter most.
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