What I've learned from lockdown

Our fight against COVID-19 is by no means over, even though businesses are returning to normal operations, and we can buy McDonalds. It’s been really tough at times. But as we carry on protecting ourselves and others against COVID-19, I’m reflecting on what I can take from the Alert level 4 lockdown into this brave new world.

Important point: if lockdown has been hard and you don’t feel like you’ve learned anything from it, fair enough. Maybe one day you’ll look back on it and think of something meaningful, and maybe you won’t. Here’s what I’m taking out of it:

Our world may have contracted, but it can be simplified.

Our packed schedules pre-COVID have been pared back, big time. We haven’t been to the hairdresser in months (this is not really a positive!), we haven’t bought those baby gates or playpen we were looking at in early March, or kept up our usual day trips and visits. We miss seeing people, but there’s a lot that we don’t need, or a lot that can simply wait. I hope to carry on this philosophy of having and doing less.

My friends and family are really good at baking and cooking, if their photos are anything to go by. 

So many people have turned to cooking for solace, and I too have craved tastes from the past and wanted to lose all sense of time in making something sweet and full of carbs. I’m looking forward to having dinner parties again – and eating that homemade sourdough and whatever the hell else you people without babies have been up to in the kitchen.

On a darker note, division may become a part of our lives.

You may have already seen people arguing with each other all over your social media feeds – was lockdown a ‘good’ idea? Shouldn’t we have let businesses keep functioning, and what’s more important – health or the economy (a false dichotomy, by the way). There may be divisions now between people who have jobs and those that lose them, those who mental health wavers in the coming months and those whose mental and emotional health is stable. Just as other turbulent times have created divisions between people (think political ideologies in Nazi Germany), COVID-19 will do the same. It’s time to mentally prepare for challenging conversations, and walk away from those that don’t serve us.

New ideas are worth considering.

Could COVID-19 make us consider some of the things we take as the fundamentals of life? Could it strip away some of what we consider to be normal? I’ve been reading about such far-flung concepts as a universal basic income, which now doesn’t seem so strange, when governments have been providing grants to many that need them, and many that haven’t received them before.

I’d really like to see the positive impacts on our environment continue. Maybe we won’t fly as much. Policies could be created to sharply reduce transportation on land, sea and air. We could make remote working a normal part of our lives, if we can work from home (but not 100% of the time!) and cut back on commutes and the carbon associated with them.

A year ago, these might have seemed like insurmountable things. But COVID will show us, they aren’t.

What have you learned?

What will you try to bring with you into Alert Level 3 and life as it continues?