To live happier and more successful lives requires acceptance and flexibility. At work, and at home.
There has been a change in strategic Covid-19 reporting. There have always been the more hopeful articles discussing, for example, how to best adapt to the New Normal at home as well as at work. Lately, I have been seeing a change in this kind of reporting in that many authors now seem to anticipate the return to our old normal - at least to some degree - and are speculating about how to best go about doing that, or what clever tricks we learned during lockdown which we should hold on to after we are back at our office desks and commute on public transport.
While I admire the optimism, it strikes me that across the board most reporting seems to look at this current crisis as a temporary blip which we just need to wait out before we can go back to mingling at the pub. I hope this is true (albeit while generally not being big on pubs myself), but there is also something that bothers me about this mindset of sitting things out, wishing time away.
It's something many of us fall into all too often. We have a holiday coming up, and we wish away the weeks until we have sand between our toes. We look forward to a wedding after getting engaged and hope for the year (or now, years - seeing the number of cancelled celebrations) to pass quickly. We start a new job and count the months to our next promotion window. It seems we have lost the ability to live the life we got right now, to work with the conditions we're presented with.
Our time on this earth is limited. Regardless of how young and healthy we may be, there is no escaping that fact. I like to measure my life-time by the number of memories I hold. For what I can not remember may as well not have taken place. This means that I can actively extend my life by creating memories; by bringing about moments worthy of being remembered, and by capturing them in some form, be it in a photo, in writing, or otherwise.
When we wish time away in anticipation of some future event or state, I believe, we are more inclined to fall into the monotony of the everyday, putting our drive to create and capture special moments into standby. This conundrum, to me, is what the movie Groundhog Day is really about. Another film, Click, in which Adam Sandler uses a magical self-learning remote control to fast-forward through his life is another vivid, more literal rendering of this idea.
If you would like to 'extend' your life and acknowledge this problem, you might first need to change the timescales at which you operate. While there definitely is a need to think long-term and plan and prepare for certain life events, achievements, and the like, you should also focus on what is in front of you. Even if this were just a regular work week, what could you do this week, to create memories?
Sometimes the answer may be processing old ones - create a photo album, or remembering a shared experience together with a friend over Zoom, for example. Or you might want to work on bringing about new moments worth remembering, even simple ones such as trying a new recipe, exploring an area on a walk you haven't habitually gone to in the past, or doing something crafty. Finally, you could always try to - one might say, literally - make someone else's day with an actual letter or a thoughtful gift order.
Further, the sort of passivity that comes with letting time pass too easily represents lost opportunities in more tangible ways. If you are worried about not being able to make progress towards a career or project goal, maybe you just need to re-think your situation a little. Accept what you have in the moment and consider what you can do with that. Are there opportunities in remote working and spending more time at home? What have you put off for too long because normal conditions were never right for it? And what will you need in the future that you could work on right now?
I am entering into the acceptance phase of grief, and I find it invigorating. With such great ranges of estimates on when things will go back to the way they were before, I find it safest, most calming to assume that things will stay the way they are for the foreseeable future. It’s not being defeatist. It gives me energy and makes me more creative about what I can do with my time, but it also gives me times to look forward to in a future of continued change.
All this boils down to the importance of being flexible. Ever since I can remember, people would tell me that "the world is changing at an ever-increasing pace". It's true. There is no normal, be it old or new. There's only change. Lockdown or not.
So when I sit at dinner pondering the future with those closest to me, I remind myself that it's okay to look forward to it in anticipation. But I don't want to wish time away. It's all we've got.
