It Doesn’t All Have to Suck

Last week I got the COVID-19 vaccine. This weekend we celebrated a family birthday with extended family members. We have dinner reservations for our 5-year anniversary booked for this upcoming weekend. Inside. I know - crazy. Slowly, but surely, our lives are returning to some sort of “new normal” after the isolation of the past year.

And, yet, I’m hesitant. It’s hard to put my finger on why exactly. As a family we’ve gotten used to our new routine, so there’s some resistance to change. There’s also a little bit of social anxiety. For the past year, it’s been my mission to keep ourselves as far away from people as possible. Closeness is now uncomfortable. There’s also a lot of uncertainty as to what this new normal is going to look like. It’s a lot to process.

There’s also an acknowledgement that last year didn’t all suck. Don’t get me wrong - in the grand view of humanity it majorly sucked.

  • Loss of life

  • Loss of livelihoods

  • Trauma

And yet, through it all, there was actually some beauty to be seen. I saw communities come together to support each other in a way I’d never seen before. I saw families forced to slow down and spend time together. We had to stop the rush-rush and be more intentional for the sake of everything important to us.

I can 100% vouch this was the case for my family. We enjoyed slower mornings without commutes. I got to see my son really develop from a baby into this talking, opinionated little toddler. My husband got to spend more time with our newborn than he ever would have been able to before and I got some added support as a post-partum mother.

How do we move forward into this next phase of life and not lose or take for granted the beauty of this weird pandemic world?

I believe the answer lies in taking the time for reflection and in being more intentional in how we create our post-COVID lives.

I encourage you to take some time and journal about these questions. Don’t just think about it; actually write down your thoughts. I promise you, it’s worth it.

  • What did you gain through the last year?

  • What did you appreciate about the last year?

  • What got you through the hard days?

  • What made the easy days easy?

  • If there’s one thing you want to carry forward into this next phase, what would it be?

For me, we gained a freedom with our time that we’d lost. Pre-COVID, every weekend was booked for months. I kid you not, we used to schedule “do nothing” weekends just so we could have one or two days a couple times a year that were not scheduled with events. I’m not sure I want to go back to the constant go-go-go of packed weekends. Maybe this means we limit our scheduled activities to one per weekend. I’m not sure, but I do know I don’t want to lose the laziness and spontaneity of what we gained, and I can already see it slipping away if we’re not careful.

Over the last year, we’ve all adjusted and we’re back in a new sort of auto-pilot. As things get back to normal, we have an opportunity to disrupt the auto-pilot and be really, really intentional about what we want life to look like.

Don’t let this opportunity slip away.

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The Best Time I Was Ever Wrong

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Move Over Mom Guilt — I’ve Got Co-Worker Guilt