Reflections on a summer unlike any other

As I sit here on the auspice of fall, with leaves falling and the weather changing, I am struck by the peculiarities of time in this moment. It has been five months since I prematurely said goodbye to my university friends and moved back home from Hamilton, Ontario, where I had spent 4 years getting a degree from McMaster University. Bags in the car and a highway ahead of me, I wondered what the next 5 months of summer would bring. Hopes, dreams, and plans cultivated for that summer crushed by the massive weight of the COVID-19 pandemic. Time seemed to slow down, days felt like weeks, weeks felt like months, as the news shifted and morphed into something different each day. Yet each day was also the same, the endless passage of the sun from east to west and continued drudgery of killing time.

My initial plan upon graduating was to move into health policy as I had made the fateful choice the summer prior to forgo applying to law school, thereby thrusting myself into the uncertainty of finding employment with only a dual Bachelor’s in Arts and Science and Political Science. Almost immediately upon lockdown, the various governments issued hiring freezes, rightly so, to concentrate all their efforts and resources on “flattening the curve” and reducing the impact of the Coronavirus. Furthermore, hiring was not particularly at the top of any business’s mind as they fought to keep from being crushed by the rocks of the crumbling economy. I was left with an abundance of time, and not much to spend it on.

Time. Time is the eternal enemy of us all, in a battle we have no hope of winning. Our entire lives revolve around how to allocate this finite and precious resource. Whether to maximize productivity or happiness? Can you do both? Early on in the pandemic, and continuing through, I noticed a clash of messaging. One side seemed to be saying, “use this time, better yourself, skill up, if you don’t have three new skills when this is done you’ve wasted it” (my parents are firmly entrenched on this side of the debate). The other side was, to me, more empathetic, “work on yourself first, it’s a stressful time, don’t put too much pressure”. I can see the value from both sides, one team recognizes what is undoubtedly the reality of the world, that skills are the future and one should use their time to position themselves better for the “new normal” and whatever comes next. However, the other team taps into fundamental human nature, that we are likely to be overwhelmed by the cataclysmic shift occurring both on a health and societal basis.

So how then to spend the magnitude of time I had at my disposal? Obviously, I continued looking for work, with little success. I tried to find courses that would help prepare me better for the future, again with varying degrees of success. I, like the rest of the world, dove into my Netflix library. (Remember Tiger King? That seems like a millennium ago.) But as I sit here, summer having come and gone, I am left with this feeling that I could have done more. Why didn’t I learn a new language, pick up the guitar, or code a website? The conversations I had with people were helpful, but my network could be even stronger. But I think that takes away from the resilience of all of us who are still here, who see the sun rise and set each day. It will always be true that more could be done, there is never a potential that is reached, but what we are living through cannot be overstated. Our lives are fundamentally different, in potentially traumatic ways, than they were 6 months ago. And I have to come to terms with the fact that whatever I did, the small acts of working on myself, were done in the overwhelming face of something very few people have ever experienced, and practically nobody was prepared for.

I’m going to continue to move forward, taking small steps each day to become who I want to be, while recognizing that who I am is still pretty damn good. This blog will be a place for me to post my thoughts on the world around us, little tidbits I find interesting, and just generally a look into what a 2020 graduate’s world is like.