“It is a marathon, not a sprint” is a refrain I’ve heard and read a few times over the past weeks in reference to the widespread COVID-19 lock downs.
Of course, it is one thing to hear and read something and quite another thing to accept and absorb.
I went through that process during the middle of last week. I think it was caused by a piece of news that laid out what the rest of the year likely entailed. Unlike similar pieces that had little impact, this one started that cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Perhaps I was finally ready to face facts.
For a full 24 hours that followed, I felt as though the wind had been knocked out of me. Everything I did happened at 0.5x speed while I processed what I was feeling.
Then, the fog lifted and I realized I had moved to acceptance. I had a good work-from-home set up pre-COVID but had been coming to the realization that a couple of upgrades (chair, webcam) were going to be helpful.
But, more than anything else, the biggest shift I needed to make was mental.
In our attempts to find some semblance of a routine with work and the kids, I had postponed processing this. I think I clung onto some vague hope that we’d get back to some semblance of what I called “normal” in a few weeks.
But, normal isn’t going to be what it used to be – for a while at any rate. :-) And, hope is not a strategy.
So, it was time for a much needed mental reset.
