During lockdown gloabally, there were some interesting lessons to be learnt and some things to take away. There was to a degree a forced back to basics, which I believe was a truly invaluable experience both personally and professionally. If anything, I’ve become more engrossed in my profession and truly grateful for it.
What will be your take away from all of this? What have you learnt from this experience? What changes would you like to see in your world after this?
We learnt the value of routine.
Routine became one of the most valuable things we took for granted and some even struggled with the lack of routine. Most people attempted to build their own routine or incorporate little daily rituals. For me, something I did every day while working was make a to-do list to keep me focused. I made a daily to-do list and a weekly check list to ensure I kept up with corrections and admin (admin is one in particular that was very valuable). These little to-do lists would take about 5 minutes but proved to keep me on track, I would check it off as the day went, which gives that overwhelming feeling of ‘getting shit done, boss mode’ and was great to get to the bottom of that list every day. On the days that I didn’t – it was simply added to the next day.
We had a revitalised sense of community.
Without delving into a rabbit hole, in a capitalist and neoliberal society, community has been truly lost. Individualism is promoted on every front, as a consumer, as a professional, in almost every aspect of our lives.
We learnt to value self-care.
Self-care is something that I am very inconsistent with, I am a sucker for a bath and a pamper, but other arguably more important aspects of self-care are often neglected. One really simple thing was dedicating time to read fiction and listening to podcasts. I’ve been considering this as an educator – when do I hit burn out and how can I control that better, how do I incorporate self-care into my routine (almost in a year long sense). What was something that got you through this difficult time?
Transparency became abundant.
There was a strong sense of seeing people, really seeing people. This meant seeing people live their values, something under normal circumstances we wouldn’t normally see on a day-to-day. As I mentioned this was a back-to-basics in a lot of ways, for me, this meant revisiting my values and revising how I live them, promote them and demonstrate them.
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