Perhaps We Were Meant to Slow Down

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time at home after an accident has prompted me to slow down and contemplate life’s rythyms and it got me reflecting about the pandemic and if there were any lessons to learn.

Now there are certain things about the pandemic that we definitely shouldn’t romanticise.

People died. People lost jobs. Businesses disappeared. Families were separated. Healthcare and other frontline workers were exhausted. The world as we knew it shut down. City CBDs resembled the zombie apocalypse. It was like all the science fiction movies of my youth had come to pass.

There was grief, fear, loneliness and an extraordinary large amount of arguing with strangers on Facebook about whether standing 1.5 metres away from someone in a supermarket was sufficient evidence of personal liberty.

And yet, looking back now, I sometimes wonder whether we have been too quick to forget some of the things lockdown taught us.

Not the epidemiology or the toilet paper wars or that strange period when sourdough starter spent an inordinately large amount of time in people’s fridges. I mean the quieter things. For a while, the world stopped and weirdly perhaps some of us needed it to.

Lockdown gave us something our normal lives had become remarkably bad at providing: permission to stay home.

Before COVID, staying home on a Friday night could feel vaguely antisocial. Suddenly it was civic responsibility. You weren’t being boring you were saving lives from the comfort of your sofa.

It was, in many respects, the greatest excuse ever invented for staying home. There was no explanation required. Now I am acutely aware that everybody’s experience was different.

Share

And then there was the Oodie, something I have discovered again during winter while recovering from a broken elbow.

The Oodie was almost perfectly designed for the pandemic moment. A giant wearable blanket that looked like something you might wear after being released from hospital, or possibly while waiting for the rescue helicopter to arrive. But it was also brilliant and warm and comforting.

The Australian invention became a lockdown phenomenon as people spent more time at home, with sales surging as loungewear became less of a guilty pleasure and more of an acceptable way to live life at home.

The Oodie captured something important about the period: Comfort mattered.

We had spent years buying clothes that made us look productive, successful, fashionable and ready for the next meeting. Then suddenly nobody cared.

The only question was whether you were warm and perhaps that wasn’t such a bad recalibration.

we can’t forget that lockdown also produced an extraordinary burst of entrepreneurial creativity.

People who had never considered themselves entrepreneurs suddenly found themselves making things, selling things, baking things, delivering things to neighbours and turning obscure hobbies into businesses.

The digital economy accelerated because it had to. Restaurants became takeaway operations and shops moved online. People learned how to use Zoom, often with varying degrees of success. The home office became the office and the kitchen table became a boardroom.

And somewhere in all of this, people discovered that the world of work didn’t necessarily need to look exactly as it had looked for the previous hundred years.

That may be one of the most important lessons we should have kept. We learned that work could be flexible. We finally learned that some meetings could be emails.

Then there was family. For some people, lockdown meant being separated from the people they loved. For others, it meant suddenly spending far more time with them than they had ever imagined possible.

Parents discovered what their children actually did during the day. Children discovered that their parents weren’t particularly good at homeschooling. Couples discovered that the person they had married apparently had strong opinions about dishwasher loading.

Families cooked together, walked together, watched movies, played games and talked.

Not always successfully, obviously. There were probably moments when many parents looked longingly at the front door and wondered whether it would be socially acceptable to move into the garage.

But something had changed.

We had been reminded that relationships don’t maintain themselves simply because we love people. They require time and energy.

Before the pandemic, we often treated time with family as something that had to be fitted around everything else. During lockdown, everything else disappeared and families remained. Habits were formed for family life because they had to.

Suddenly the family wasn’t the thing we squeezed into the gaps between work, sport, commuting, shopping, appointments, travel and social commitments.

Family was every day.

And then there was television. Oh, television.

If lockdown taught us anything, it was that sometimes you don’t need challenging television. Sometimes you need Ted Lasso.

When Ted Lasso arrived in 2020, it landed at almost precisely the right cultural moment. Its first season was released while much of the world was living through lockdown and its warmth, optimism and basic belief in human decency made it feel like television had been designed specifically to give us a big optimistic hug.

There was something wonderfully reassuring about rewatching things we already knew.

Parks and Recreation, The Office and other comfort watch TV series were in high rotation. 8 of Ten Cats Does Countdown was a daily routine.

We didn’t always want another plot twist or necessarily want to discover who the murderer was. Mostly we just wanted to know that everyone was going to be alright.

On reflection there is something deeply human about comfort viewing. When the world becomes uncertain, familiarity becomes a kind of shelter.

You know that everything will eventually return to normal, even if only within the fictional universe of AFC Richmond.

We shouldn’t underestimate the value of that because live in a culture that constantly tells us we should be moving forward.

Lockdown reminded us that going backwards occasionally isn’t necessarily a failure.

Sometimes rewatching an old favourite is exactly what you need, eating the same meal again is fine a the walk around the block is enough.

Share

Perhaps this is the lesson we were supposed to take with us.

Not that lockdown was good. It really wasn’t. Millions of people died. The suffering was real and unevenly distributed, and for many people those years remain associated with profound loss.

But within the disruption, some things became visible.

We saw that our lives could be organised differently and the work could be more flexible for most.

Creativity emerges when conventional routes aren’t available and people can be remarkably inventive.

We discovered that wearing pyjamas below the waist during a Zoom meeting is one of the great technological gifts of the modern age.

And maybe most of all we discovered that comfort isn’t necessarily laziness. Maybe that’s the part we’ve forgotten.

We came out of lockdown promising ourselves that we would never take freedom for granted again. Then, gradually, many of us went straight back to filling every available minute.

We became busy again. Very busy. Perhaps too busy.

The strange thing about lockdown is that it forced us to ask questions that we might otherwise have avoided.

What do I actually need? Who do I actually want to spend time with?What work really matters? What can I live without?

But we really don’t need another pandemic to answer those questions.

We can simply remember the family dinner, the walk around the block, the book we finally had time to read, the business idea that started around the kitchen table and the Oodie.

And maybe, occasionally, put on Ted Lasso and let someone remind you that being kind isn’t a particularly radical idea. After all a new season is starting and it’s ripe for a rewatch.

Lockdown gave us many things we never wanted. But it also gave some of us a glimpse of a different rhythm of life.

The challenge now isn’t to recreate lockdown but remember what was worth keeping.

And if that means doing it while wearing an enormous fleece blanket with sleeves, and watching Ted Lasso for the fourth time, then frankly, I think we’ve earned it.

Subscribe now