Before and After

About a week or ago, I got an email that caught me by surprise – there was an update to my blog!

I was immediately puzzled because I had not recalled scheduling anything, but I opened up the email and there it was…a blog post about always feeling like there’s not enough time in the day. It was, in the brief moments before I logged in to take it down, like staring into the past of a previous life. I had written this and scheduled it far ahead, some months ago. We’ll call it the ‘before times,’ because that’s what it feels like most days.

In the before times, I thought nothing of writing about how overwhelmed I felt by a barrage of daily responsibilities all tumbling down at the same time and now I look back on that as rather…naive?  

Like many other folks out there, we’ve been social distancing since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and though only a few months have passed since that began, it seems in many ways like another era, something that I came face to face with when reading this post drafted so many months ago about problems that seemed ‘crucial.’

Since then, grocery store trips have become a solo venture, my mask and gloves firmly in place, postage gets purchased and printed online for packages that need to be mailed, work is done remotely, the schoolroom is virtual, and talking to friends or family becomes a bit of an ‘event’ and done so through the safety of technology or talks through a window to the driveway. It’s become a new world, at least it has if you’re taking the steps necessary to keep yourself and especially those around you healthy.

In so many ways, it really is another time and accidentally looking back at a mindset of a past not so long ago but so vastly different is a great reminder that no matter what our situation is in this time of crisis, that we hopefully recognize that some of the irks of our lives then are put into a bit of perspective, and we see that some things were not as much a reason for concern as we thought.

There’s a lot of voices crying out for a return to normal. But as has been said by wiser people than myself, maybe we should stop and think of what parts of ‘normal’ we really want to go back to.