Routine. What is your relationship to that word? Is routine a safe haven? A comfortable place where we are surrounded by the known and feel OK? A place of control. Or is it boring, unimaginative, stifling and inflexible. Maybe it’s somewhere between the two? Perhaps it hadn’t been considered in your experience of the world – until Covid19. Much of the population is finding themselves in new territory; staying at home to work, with or without children; home schooling; being alone and loving it or experiencing loneliness; unemployment; financial pressures; Centre Link; separation from significant family; additional challenges to existing ones; caring for disabled loved ones without support workers; living in an abusive relationship with no reprieve; fear of catching the virus. It goes on and on.
Whatever is going on for you at the moment, there is a possibility that you are creating a new daily routine. How does this feel? Is it exciting? A time to re-examine what was working well for you in life and what required a tweak or is it just plain annoying and you can’t wait for life to go back to normal? Our lives have so many different segments. Primary relationship, family relationships, friendships, work, exercise, food, hobbies, sport, social life, spiritual life. How are these life segments working for you? It can be a time of reflection? The intensity of time at home may be growing the beauty in your relationship or tearing it apart. You may have changed your eating habits. Bingeing on junk food and feeling anxious or spending more time with family, creating healthy meals together. Crashing in front of telly and watching endless Netflix, or out pounding the pavement with a new exercise regime. Are you creating a new fixed routine or are you allowing the day to have some fluid flow?
Testing times do one of two things generally – they can flatten us or they can ignite us, into finding positive parts of ourselves that hitherto had been unavailable. Parts that are willing to see a big challenge and take a deep breath and say “I am not sure how I am going to surface after this, but I will have a go and do my best.” For me personally, I have limited work at the moment. As a massage therapist and counsellor, one stream of my work is currently gone. Do I sink and hope that we have a quick return to my normal work routine or do I examine the options? I am offering online counselling for my clients now and have learnt quite a bit about technology, insurance and marketing in the process. Had Covid19 not happened this may not have surfaced.
Who are you at the moment? What is Covid19 offering to teach you about yourself. Where are you sending your attention? Are you focusing on the difficult, the overload and the unfair or allowing yourself to feel all of these things, but not allowing them to define your daily experience or ideas about what may lie ahead. Ahead lies possibility, potential and opportunities. Positive attributes are the hallmarks of those who thrive in our world.
There are some beautiful attributes that you can practice to enhance your ability to create a new “routine” after Covid19; flexibility, creativity, adaptation, inclusiveness, resilience, team, community focus. Each day you wake up, there are new possibilities, even within your household. A diamond is formed under intense pressure. Pure, pristine and sparkling. Shine on you lovely diamonds. Together we have got this.
