Finding Joy in a Mandatory Slowdown
Doesn’t Make You Guilty or Less Human.
Things that are louder in my world
- Birds chirping
- Stillness
- Connection with loved ones
Things that are quieter in my world
- The traffic humming three streets away in my LA neighborhood
- My mind
- My anxiety
I often feel I was born at the wrong time.
The world I was born into moves, shakes and buzzes.
Go, go, go.
My temperament and personality are more suited for a world without iPhones and 343 channels to choose from.
I’d probably feel more comfortable living in the period between the late 1800s and early 1940s, after the introduction of electricity, but before the television brightened every household with its blue-light filtered screen.
And while I wouldn’t want to be subjected to how women were treated during the time Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf lived and wrote some of the best literature (women didn’t get the right to vote until 1920), I still find something romantic about the century before the lightbulb changed the way people lived.
My knowledge of this period is mostly shaped by reading and rereading those books penned by those two great talents, along with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre — possibly my favorite book of all time.
Writing by candlelight and filling my days with anything but Netflix or a smartphone is alluring and dreamy.
While significant advantages and advances come from the internet — we are seeing those positives play out now, connecting us with those we love, keeping us social while physically healthy — we’ve also lost something; peace of mind. I vacillate between loathing my iPhone and being grateful for it all at once.
Before the smartphone, I found the presence of mind without the constant barrage of social media notifications and texts buzzing with urgent messages.
I’m at my happiest when my phone is three rooms away and don’t check it for hours. I’m easily distracted, and I’ve noticed since the smartphone, my thoughts are more jumbled, my attention span limited, my mind less calm.
Before the advent of electricity, the activities available were ones that expanded your mind and promoted deep thought. People would gather in sitting rooms just to drink tea, with no sound but conversation to fill the room.
I imagine life back then to be quiet like it is now.
Hours spent reading, writing, playing instruments, acting out plays, making things with your hands, just reference any scene from Sense and Sensibility, my favorite Jane Austen novel. With electricity came longer working hours, less sleep and a lot less family time.
So, when the world slowed down at the end of February — this is how long I’ve self-quarantined with my family (we only go out for necessities, and now we have limited even that) — I was happy. I was scared but happy when the world got quieter.
These paradoxical moments are mind-boggling.
Uncertainty breeds anxiety
While the uncertainly of the pandemic breeds anxiety, I’ve experienced a new calm in my day to day.
Evenings filled with hour-long walks and a lot of reading and writing during the day, I now drift off to sleep at night easily, even while the world burns.
Pre-pandemic I had a harder time holding onto calm in conjunction with daily commutes, errands to run, friends to meet, and projects to accomplish.
If you can, this is the perfect time to practice kindness and patience and not beat yourself up over all those home projects you aren’t performing that you had in mind at the beginning of mandatory shelter-in-place orders. Just because you have more time, doesn’t necessarily mean you have to fill it with productivity.
Filling time with those things you enjoy doing, but couldn’t before, like reading and writing, will decrease your stress. Just being peacefully in the moment is the perfect antidote to anxiety.
Writing is a meditative practice with many stress-reducing benefits.
Write in a journal about this exceptional time we are living through. My child will always remember the time school shut down for months with no definite start date. As a parent, I will never forget the time when she was home with me all day and didn’t go back to school for x number of days. Documenting this moment in history is something worthwhile; you may want to remember years from now what it was like when we were all trapped at home with no end in sight.
You aren’t in control
This experience is out of our control. Those of us with the attitude that “shit happens” — that we humans have no control over this — will come out the other end of the pandemic with more resilience than those of us who think we can control everything.
Assuming you can control everything is an exercise in futility, and often times just makes you feel inadequate and filled with shame.
Knowing you aren’t the master of your universe is a more healthy and realistic way to get through the ups and downs of life that are gifted to us all.
How you feel is OK
Minimizing the positive emotions you feel doesn’t make you a better person; it won’t make you a more compassionate person or a better resource for those who need you while the world suffers.
Enjoying the silver lining of a crisis will give you more patience. Along with more patience comes more tolerance with those you love. Having more tolerance with those you love allows you to notice, but not obsess over the cracks in your relationships, and focus instead on the light that comes through those cracks — the positive aspects of your loved ones.
Whatever emotions you feel during this time of crisis are the feelings you are feeling; they are neither right nor wrong, but simply how you feel.
Accepting that not everyone will mirror the emotions you have will give you more patience.
Negating your joy over a mandatory slow-down won’t help you or make you more equipped to help those people who may not be experiencing your happiness.
Seeing a silver lining is brave. It means you have hope.
“Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering Type A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
