Can you believe that today would have been the first day back to “normal” life? Going into lockdown the prospect of spending 21 days in isolation and having my life turned upside down terrified me. I thought that the days would drag by, I thought that I would go crazy stuck inside all day, every day; and I thought that it would kill me to be away from home and all the people that I loved and was so used to being around every day, but 21 days have sped by as fast as the speed of light.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these past 3 weeks and I have thought about how it has turned out to be different from how I thought that it would be. I think about how easily I adapted and how things that felt impossible just 3 weeks ago have now been done and it actually wasn’t that bad. I think that the one thing that I realised about life is that it is almost too easy to get too comfortable - I feel like I was caught up in a cycle and anything outside of my norm felt like an impossible undertaking (or maybe that was just plain laziness), but every now and then we need to get our feathers ruffled and our worlds involuntarily turned upside down to remind us that there is more to life than the cycle that we have fallen victim to.
What I have found during this time is that we are adaptable and we are more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for. What is for certain is that the way that we knew life will not be what we will be returning to, things are going to be remarkably different - the way that we work will be different, the way that we shop will be different and even the way that we socialise will be different. We have a fuck load of adapting ahead of us, but in the wise words of Doreen, “Change is as good as a holiday.”
It terrifies me and excites me all at once when I think about the extent of change that is before us. As I like to say, “I can’t see the leaves from the trees”, and I feel as if my favourite misworded expression explains humanity as we were – we were so caught up in our own worlds completely disconnected and self-involved, and I feel as if this global lockdown has almost been like a much-needed forced restart to all of humanity.
So this would have been the end of lockdown but the reality is that we are far from the end, the journey of change is merely just beginning. We are adaptable by nature and change is inevitable, and what I have learned over the past 22 days is that change is almost never a bad thing, what makes it a negative experience is the level of resistance applied.
Be safe xx