Just before the shutdown began, I was talking with one of my neighbours, a wonderful woman in her 80s who remembers the Nazi occupation of her native Holland. She remarked that the restrictions reminded her of that awful episode in that time was taking on the same odd quality: there was today when you focused on dealing with today’s problems in the knowledge that any solution might not work tomorrow and there was an unpredictable future when the world would be better but in between, in the middle ground, there was nothing.
As I have settled into what my good friend, Kim Evans, has christened helpfully the ‘new abnormal’ and have started to adapt to living differently, I continue to be struck by the truth of my neighbour’s words. We deal with today’s problems and hope for a time when ‘all this will be over’ knowing that that time will not, cannot, look like the time before but in the middle distance there is just fog.
Now, this is something of a challenge for someone who quite likes control and spends most of her working life in the land of strategy and business planning, the place of ‘what will we do in one, two or three years’ time?’. So, I started to think about how I could use this weird time, because the alternative of wasting it would just make things worse.
For me, the answer is to take this time when the usual rules don’t apply to try some stuff out, to experiment, to fail and learn from the failure and hopefully to get ready for whatever shape this sector, country and world are in on the other side. I don’t know what the other side will look like but I know that the landscape will have changed, some familiar landmarks will have disappeared, some roads will have been washed out, some rivers will be running in new courses and people will have made new footpaths to different destinations. I am getting ready by letting go of some old habits and routines whose sell- by date has been reached and trying on for size some new ideas and ways of working and living. And I am reflecting and journaling like mad so I can process the day to day and learn from experiments.
However you are choosing to meet the challenge of this odd time, we wish you well.
Susan and Dawn
Reflective practice resources
If you are interested in the benefits of journalling you might want to have a look at:
Arts Professional – Leadership through reflective journalling