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Key points
- While "the pause" — aka COVID lockdown — sparked some unhealthy habits, it also inspired creative pursuits and self-discovery.
- COVID helped many people see what matters in their lives, making them determined to regain those things post-pandemic.
- It's easy to pick up where one left off before COVID lockdown, but there's also the opportunity to reinvent oneself based on new self-knowledge.
We have just experienced the global slowing of human activities — what some have termed the anthropause – and have learned a lot from it about things like reducing air pollution and restoring certain kinds of silence. Similarly, much can be gained from examining our individual slowing, a kind of personapause. We ceased our customary doings and ways of living. Time itself seemed to unfurl differently in our daily lives as we adapted to being halted and confined. Now, we get to do a personal inventory, appraising how we changed, who we became, what we lost, and what we want to keep about what we gained.
Positive changes due to disruption
There are advantages to having been disrupted, but we have to be deliberate about noticing and then examining them. What held us together when so much was taken away? What affirmed our identity when external sources of confidence vanished? Who did we become when we were left to our own devices? There has been a rise in substance use and binging on video games, but there has also been an increase in writing groups, artistic exploration, and introspection through therapy, journal-writing, and reading blogs across the spectrum of human inquiry.
Old patterns have been broken. Reassembling them may not make sense anymore. For instance, eating out before the pandemic might have led to weight gain and a negative impact financially. Home cooking is likely to have saved plenty of excess calories and allowed some money to accumulate rather than disappear. Thanks to the involuntary cessation of such pleasures, their value can be assessed. But we have to decide to hold to the truth of such realizations, to raise further questions, and to probe our private narratives lest these insights slip away.
How much socializing do you really want to resume? Did you truly miss certain kinds of social occasions or can you live without them? Even if you are ready to do an honest accounting, you may not like what you find. What had been done previously out of habit or obligation, rather than enthusiasm, may stand revealed. You may be more of a loner than you realized, or have a greater need for solitude than you have ever acknowledged. Friends may have been honed down to those who really made a difference, rather than those who were merely convenient. When getting together became arduous, the ones we made sure to stay in touch with may have stood out for being worth the effort while others could be let go.
Regaining what has been lost
One cold winter evening, I was walking in my neighborhood and passed two women who were huddled over a fire they had made in an improvised metal container in the middle of a porch. After I called out my praise for their determination, one proclaimed, “We just had to see each other.” On my way back a half-hour later, they were still there and talking away with great animation. I just smiled and nodded. They were clearly freezing out there, just as were all of us who found porch heaters sold out all over the country. Their friendship had prevailed over the obstacles.
What we have been missing, the content of our longing, is especially revealing and worthy of emphasis. I had been seeing my 10-year-old granddaughter throughout the pandemic, masked in her backyard. One day more than a year into these strange days, she said quietly but fervently, “I wish we could play our games with the dolls.” Prior to COVID, we’d had two storylines going that we would expand weekly, with the dolls serving as the main characters in our adventures — jumping, flying, verbally sparring, egging each other on. Her remark made me realize that a whole dimension of our relationship had dropped away. The dolls had been avatars of parts of ourselves that we didn’t get to show in regular life; we were sassier, braver, and unbound by the constraints of age differences and even gravity. In contrast, the backyard encounters were distanced and earthbound.
Grief for what has been lost is part of this overall reckoning because loss is such a keen measure of value. Some things can’t be reclaimed, like missed graduations, canceled performances, or transient milestones in the lives of small children. But we can resume our lives determined to place such occasions in the center, to increase our cherishing and the ways we pay attention to events from the mundane to the profound. A few weeks ago, we played with the dolls again, and what a story it was, our characters filled with more verve than ever.
Discovering what is essential about who we are
Above all, we must resist the urge to go back to normal, even though the inklings of our pre-COVID identity are surely tempting. The familiar has great allure, filled with illusions of safety and predictability. To pick up where we left off can seem victorious in some ways. But the pause gave us a glimpse into what is essential about who we are and what our best life might look like. Heeding what we learned when aspects of ourselves shifted is a unique opportunity. Now is the time to take stock of what mattered and what didn’t for the past 18 months, to go forward from here with what we learned from pausing. To declare a new beginning, to re-invent ourselves, is not easy, but it is energizing and can feel like solace.
Copyright: Wendy Lustbader, 2021
