La vie est belle (Eng.: Life is beautiful)

What I Have Learned from the Lockdown

The pandemic’s positive effects on my life

February 28th, 2020 was my last day in the office before the lockdown. It was a Friday, we started receiving the news that the numbers of active cases will spike in the coming weeks. We took the collective decision to encourage home-office as far as possible. My commute to work is a 2-hour train ride in each direction. We decided to let any employee commuting for longer than 30 minutes by public transportation do home office. I was one of those people.

I was used to home-office. During a normal week, I would work one or two days from home. The concept of working from home was not new to me. I have my office, my dual monitors, and a good connection to the servers at work. The first two weeks passed by pretty fast. I was doing home-office, but there was no official lockdown yet (in Germany). I would wake up at 7 am, start working at 8:30 am and I stop working at around 5 pm. I was not commuting anymore, so my days had 4 extra hours of “me” time. I used this extra time for reading, playing video games, catching up on Netflix, and doing some other activities.

On my third week in home-office, I started getting nervous. I was not used to staying put. My work demands that I travel a lot and I was used to it. There were some weeks, where I’d been in 4 to 5 different cities in different countries. I was used to this lifestyle and now all of a sudden I was home for three whole weeks.

Then there was the lockdown

Even though Germany did not have a strict lockdown as some other countries. Everything shut down. The stores in the city center, hotels, swimming pools, sports venues, etc. Now I had to stay home and there was nothing else to do. I tried as much as possible to keep busy, but after playing video games for endless hours, after reading multiple books, after binge-watching all of Netflix’s new releases, there was nothing left to do, and the darkness took over me.

I was waking up in a bad mood, I even broke things in my home so I have an excuse to fix them, I was desperate. I needed something to do and the options were very limited.

I knew I had to change something. If I continued like this, I would end up in a bad place. I had to find a way around.

Friends are therapeutic

One day, my friends and I (we are located all over the world) decided to join a zoom call, have a drink together, and just talk. It was a nice evening. We were all in lockdown in different countries and cities. Zoom parties were our equivalent for “going to the bar” or “meeting in a coffee house”.

We would talk about everything from indie songs, Netflix shows, movies that we would recommend each other, religion, politics, science, and we would talk about our issues. On some days friends of friends joined our calls, this allowed me to meet new people.

Life and its responsibilities stole time from me and my friends. We weren’t talking much before the pandemic. We were just sharing memes on a WhatsApp group. The pandemic allowed me to reconnect with my friends and for that I’m thankful.

One day I was talking to my friends and I was talking about the types of thoughts I usually have and think about. They encouraged me to start a blog and to take my thoughts and ideas out of the confined space, which is my head. So, If you guys are reading this, thank you! I developed a new hobby and you are the reason behind it.

Prioritize your life

After I reconnected with my friends I started prioritizing my life. I understood that the hectic I had previously in my life was my own doing. I was focusing on a hundred things at a time and time was scarce. This took away from my hobbies, my reading, my “me” time, and my responsibilities for my health and well being.

Now, I enjoy sitting in the garden and reading a book. I actively connect with my family and friends. I try not to get bothered by the small stuff, and I focus more on the big picture.

I understand now that time is important. But you should not run around and try to make everything work immediately. Prioritize the two or three necessary items. The rest, which is not your highest priority can be done on the next day.

Don’t take life for granted

During the lockdown, I noticed that I wasn’t enjoying the small stuff in my daily life. I was not paying attention to spring. I was not enjoying the small beauties of life. I was not taking in all the joy of life. My dad used always to say:

People never appreciate what they have until it is gone.

And during the lockdown, this saying was true. I started appreciating everything. Going out for groceries was not a chore anymore, it was a little adventure. I walked to the grocery store in one way and went back home from a new way every time. I explored my neighborhood and discovered new corners and beauties in it, which I did not know before.

In the end, I acknowledge that the recent lockdown was hard on many people if not all people. Many thanks go out to the people in the medical field, who daily risked their lives for ours. However, I encourage you to take a look at your life before the lockdown and after it and try to identify the small things in life, that you didn’t pay attention to prior lockdown, or maybe did not appreciate their beauty before like spending time with family or with friends. Life is beautiful and a mistake we always do is not to appreciate it enough. I hope we all go back to normal soon enough, but this time we would be happier about the small things in life.