Wagging your way out of the pandemic!

 

What an year that was 2020? 2021 whew! Glad we are still alive and well. 

Come March 2021 and it will be an year of excruciating pain and mixed emotions for all the happenings through the year! First there was the pandemic announcement and then there is the Work From Home (WFH) change. That was a bigger problem than the pandemic.

Having a timetable to walk through the day worked for some weeks, some weeks were completely ad-hoc!

Having lunches and dinners took a different personality already! We started having lunches and dinners at different times based on the time we woke up and what each person was feeling on that day!

Co-ordinating school schedules, class schedules for the kids and the elderly in the house is a job by itself. Having meetings when the kids are in school is a positive, however the kids lose out on the coaching from parents. We had zoom meetings crash in the middle of the meeting and the kids running all around, pets walking by the camera!

We survived all through that. It made you realize the importance of having a workplace where you can connect in person with the other party. We took so much for granted when we were at work that it makes us appreciate the calmness of a work environment even more!Participating in the successes and failures of fellow team members is a critical ask. Expression of incorrect emotions can derail the proceedings of any organization. Connecting to team members is so critical to progress through projects is important!

Creating complete demarcation between family life and work life is a distant dream! There is lot of overlap on things that happen in the house and the things that happen at work. The spouse is your team member who has to buy in to the ideas for a given project say food, play, vacation. The kids are the new college grade (NCG) we are trying to train to make them responsible adults and make the fully functional adult members of the team.The elderly are the speech writers and the PR face of our house. The press announcements for the family comes in the form of emails and zoom calls are town halls that happen with families. So much happening in every family! It is trivial to say that family is not an important space of development. The lady of the house is the managing director of the firm and she sets the tone for the kind of organization that this will turn out to be. Reducing waste in the form of food is critical to make sure that kids learn the importance of saving. Saving money comes from saving food and only eating what is ordered. You cannot travel to meet relatives at your own convenience all that costs money just like work travel is an expense.

Each person staying in their own confines is saving a lot of money. All in all the pandemic opened another dimension of thinking and spirituality never thought before! It taught having patience is a skill that needs to be developed and nurtured. It has got most folks thinking about they are doing what they like at their point in life. 

The one family that would have benefitted most from this break would be the ones with little kids and newborns. It made it easier for the family to manage the new-born while providing care to the older one. It provided enough time for people to plan how they will handle juggling work, family and other priorities.

We have to be strong to come out of this pandemic break, because things have changed quite a bit. We may have to work harder for what we had before. Appreciate people who are putting in all they have to make a living.Not everybody gets everything at the right time, there are people who miss out. This pandemic break has given some of those people a chance to recover, a chance to come back stronger. At the same time it has opened up some of the top runners to notice the people in the trenches and help them out in all the ways possible to them! This is creating a balance in the things and activities of most people. It has tried to remove the skew in the graph of humanity and make it somewhat parallel to the earth below.

The only way out is being grateful for the things you have and strive to be better in health both emotional and physical. Staying active keeps the adrenaline going in these tough times and provides the positive outlook to come out victorious in this situation!!