My house is pretty chaotic right now.
Before the pandemic and ensuing shelter-in-place orders, my wife and I were beginning the process of selling our condo and looking for something a little bigger. My son is getting to the walking stage and once his nursery overtook my home office, it was clear we needed some bigger digs.
Then the coronavirus came along and put a pause on our move. My wife started working from home and I truly worked only from home (no more coffeehouses). And there is still a 9-month-old scooting around.
Pausing for the New Normal
So it’s gotten pretty busy around here. Every room has basically become a slash: nursery/office, dining room/office, bathroom/meditation corner.
I’m sure this will change sometime in the future, but for right now, it’s what we’re working with. And though I’m looking forward to a future when were not all on top of each other, I know I can’t put things off until then.
It’s easy to put things on hold when going through a stressful situation. We want to wait until things are better to keep moving forward. That definitely goes for living through a pandemic, as well. The statement “when things get back to normal” has become ubiquitous.
But we did that even before the pandemic, so we can’t blame it on social distancing. It’s easy to put ourselves in a holding pattern until a certain set of conditions are met. We stop our forward momentum and think that we’ll only be able to get moving again when circumstances change.
Today is the Way
But I think we do ourselves a disservice when we separate ourselves from our current situation. Even if conditions aren’t great, we really haven’t stopped living our lives. In fact, life keeps moving forward, day by day, no matter what is happening around us. Our work, our relationships, and our daily experiences are still relevant.
I once heard someone say (on an old episode of Last Comic Standing of all things), “There isn’t one way to success, success is the way.”
We could also take it to read, “There isn’t one way to live life, living your life is the way.”
You don’t have to wait for the stars to align in a certain way for you to fully invest in your life. You can do it right where you are, with the situation in front of you. Instead of waiting, you accept that the challenges and opportunities are the life you are living at that moment.
It’s not always easy when there are situations we’d rather not deal with. But they won’t go away if we avoid engaging with them. Instead, you can accept the good and bad of where you are. And you can dig into working from where you are, with what you have.
Which means that I can’t wait until we’re in a new house to get on with things. There are toys to clean up, projects to plan, and yes, articles to write. I have figure out how to be engaged right now.
There isn’t life pre- and post-pandemic. There’s just life.