Post Pandemic Pondering
I am not sure exactly what has happened to me during this past year of forced changes, but I am different.
It seems these days that I hardly recognize myself. Formerly, I was an outgoing entrepreneur that was well-known and well-liked in my community (at least as far as I know!). Today, I am small.
I still go to the office and see my clients, and I occasionally run into colleagues. I am also blessed to live in a community where I have been able to go to a restaurant or a pub and connect with others. However, in any of those situations, I can barely wait to race home to comfort and security and get into my pj’s, no matter what time of the day.
Weird, right?
There are certainly a number of contributing factors: (1) I was probably doing way too much before and was overextended; (2) mid way through the pandemic I decided to stop drinking alcohol; and (3) as I age (I am 56 now) I do find that I need more down/alone time. All and all, my energy level is waning and my tolerance for continual interactions with others has lessened. Does all of this account for my new strange behaviour though? I am not sure.
One thing that I know is this all makes me wonder — who am I now, and who will I be once things go ‘back to normal’? I also wonder if I ever would have made these shifts if Covid would not have happened in the first place. Probably not? So what, one can muse. We are all ever-changing beings and adapting to the world around us on a constant basis. I am also not sure that the effects of the pandemic on our behaviours are either good or bad. They just are. In order to survive on this planet, we must adjust accordingly to what is thrown at us, constantly.
I think that this past strange year has dragged out long enough that most of our changes have slowly become a part of our new normal. In that way, I hope that most people are doing “okay” with who they have become. However, the next scary proposition is what the heck are we all supposed to do when there are no restrictions again? Socializing, seeing our loved ones up close and personal, going to church, hugging (man, I still miss hugging)…the list of options available to us will be endless again. We certainly won’t be used to any of it, that’s for sure!
I read a very interesting article in the Globe and Mail today (Saturday March 13th edition, Opinion section) entitled “How will we face the world again?” by Linda Besner. She makes a very interesting observation about the lack of eye contact we have had over the past year. Even when we “see” people we care about on a regular basis, through Zoom for example, we are not making eye contact. The lens of the camera is slightly above where we are looking on the screen, so we are actually looking slightly down (a problem that tech companies started looking at before the pandemic). This apparently makes us all socially awkward now slightly and we will need to re-learn how to look one another in the eye again. As Besner puts it “[eye contact is]a behaviour that people with social anxiety struggle with at the best of times. Too little and you might seem evasive, untrustworthy. Too much and it’s creepy.”
These are issues that I am wondering about for myself, and I worry about how I am going to handle things once the pandemic is over. I miss some of the world as it was, but I do enjoy a lot of the isolation and slowing that has been forced upon me. I wonder if I will be strong enough to resist falling back into old habits that weren’t necessarily serving me well prior. I also worry that I have lost an important part of who I am that I am supposed to share with the world to have a positive impact on others. Inherently, this is an important value to me: to leave the world a better place than before I existed, even in very small minute ways.
Chris Hadfield speaks to the Globe and Mail about how the pandemic will change his life:
Post-COVID-19, I’m going to pretend my spaceship just landed here and be an explorer. I want to see all the familiar places and faces through new eyes, and use the unexpected time away to help rediscover where I am now. Meld together my old priorities and habits with the clean slate of reinvention. I will be very happy to see COVID-19 in the past tense, a battle won — but even happier to see the world anew.
G&M, Opinion, Plans For A New World, March 13/21
