It dawned on my husband and me as we read Julio Vincent Gambuto’s awesome article, Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting*, that there is someone out there who carry similar thoughts to us, and perhaps more people who do, too.
Julio wrote of the “disturbing” problems we faced as a nation prior to COVID-19 such as pollution; women’s rights, police brutality, and pollution just to name a few. He reminded us that these were not just pre-COVID-19 problems, these are existing problems. Finally, he pointed out that these problems will still be there once all of this is over — if we don’t do anything about them. He said, “They are problems we ignore every day, not because we’re terrible people or because we don’t care about fixing them, but because we don’t have time.”
Time. Time has been a hot topic of discussion in our household almost every other day. Ever since baby Joshua came to this world, we have been chasing time every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month. You get the point. Our single and most focused objective every day is to squeeze out more time to spend with our baby. We are extremely fortunate because I work from home, and my husband is a full time dad. In spite of all that, we still feel like we never have enough time with Joshua. So that begs the question: how do parents with full time jobs deal with this lack of time??
It’s no wonder that prior to the pandemic when life was in full swing for all of us; work, school, hanging out with friends, play dates, family gathers, etc. — we faced basic challenges every day that ranged from finance and getting in shape, to spending more time with our loved ones. Though there are many other reasons, but the common denominator was time. There just wasn’t enough time to take care of everything, so we had to prioritize — put off some things for others. If the nation’s population is struggling with finding time for their most basic desires and needs like exercising, where would we find the time to focus on larger problems like global warming? And if time was the culprit of so many of our problems before, what are we doing about it now that time is on our side? How are we spending our time during The Great Pause?
You see, the problems we faced before the pandemic still exist during this lock-down today, just in different shapes and forms. As we discover new routines, our old habits are subconsciously adapting to our new norms. Suddenly, we’re doing the same things in different ways. Which means by the time all this is over, we would have wasted The Great Pause and fallen back to old habits with old problems again.
What if this is our opportunity to figure out things we would have never otherwise had the time to? What if this is time that the Universe is somehow granting us to spend with people we love, and on things we actually care about? Some of us see our kids for just a couple of rushed hours in the morning before sending them to daycare or school, and a couple of hours after work before putting them to sleep. But now. For those of us who work from home, we actually have 24 hours now. It’s not even a choice. We have been instructed to say inside the home, with our kids, 24 hours a day. Now tell me this isn’t something you might have wished for on days when you realized your kids are growing so fast, and you’re beginning to not understand them anymore. So how are we using this time?
Before we begin to think about a better society and world, we need to start with this moment — on a granular scale, at home, ourselves. When the lock-down is lifted, do we want to come out as better, more satisfied, happier people? Or will we snap back to the days when we didn’t have a choice but complain. When we look back at our social media pages 20 years from now, will we see complaints about the enormous amount of time we had to spend with the people we love? Or will we see that we have mastered the recipe we put aside for years? Heck, when we look back at The Great Pause 5 years from now, will we regret the time we wasted?
When we see each other again on the other side, it will not be over. It will be the beginning of a huge change for each of us, and it will be up to us that it is a Great Change.