My Extraordinary Ordinary Life

As a writer, my home is my office. I’m fortunate to have a dedicated office space, but my house is my office building. While we’ve all sheltered in place, that office building has been invaded by another adult and two children, every minute, of every day. There have been huge advantages to this. We have all learned lessons that I hope we don’t lose once the lock down is over (you can read more about this in my blog, https://pentastics.com/f/lock-down-learnings-are-we-learning-lessons-just-to-lose-them) but the demands on my time have shifted dramatically, forcing me to let go of my regular routine to save my sanity. It hasn’t always been easy!

I’m what you might describe as a very left-brained person. I like lists, schedules, and being organized. I’m that person who creates a spreadsheet for our annual visits to our extended family in England so that we make the most of every minute that we’re in Blighty. My tried and tested methods for practicing time management are no contest for a pandemic.

Each morning starts with procrastination as I struggle to decide which child to check in with first, interruptions are now a regular and unavoidable part of my day as I attempt to be home learning support, and the difference between urgent and important is irrelevant when I have to drop everything to help my fourth grader join an online class or my sixth grader finish an assignment on deadline. It took me at least three weeks of trying out different versions of color-coded charts to realize that I have limited control over any given day. And it’s taken me even longer to accept it. To be honest, I don’t think I’m there yet.

Every adjustment we make to our routines brings about another compromise. I still plan my week on a Monday morning as the optimist in me refuses to completely give up on structure. But I’m trying to be less rigid with rules that are bound to be broken at the moment. At the beginning of this week, the weather in New England was a perfect mix of warmth without humidity and so I spent some much-needed time outside. Among the long list of cancellations and time spent rescheduling events and activities that we now hope to enjoy at a later date, I was able to celebrate a small sense of achievement by getting some outdoor projects underway. I made a start – not just on the task in hand – but also in being more flexible. That’s going to take a while for me to fully embrace.

One thing I hear from many friends is that they don’t want to look back on this time and wish they’d done [fill in the blank] with the time. I recently watched the movie ‘About Time’ on a Netflix Party with a group of girl-friends. One line stuck with me and has made me think seriously about how I’m coping with our current circumstances. The wonderfully talented Bill Nighy gave this advice to his on screen son about their ability to time travel:

“I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life.”

Personally, I can’t think of a better sentiment to see us through the rest of this uncertainty. There will be changes, adjustments, cancellations, and disappointments, but there is only one 2020 and we owe it to ourselves to make the best of it.