MAKING FRENEMIES WITH LOCK DOWN
Joel on adjusting to lock down and looking forward to once again celebrating life at home for what it should be - a place to come back to.
Molly has adjusted to the new normal of being at home with phenomenal ease. Aside from a two-week spell with 'the virus', staying inside, rearranging the house, watching movies and hanging out at home are some of the things that Molly loves the most. It is probably why we run a company that makes clothes for doing all those things in.
As someone who craves space, and being outside I, on the other hand, have not adjusted so well. Week 1, was ok. Many a zoom call with our team, working through the potential impacts of Coronavirus on supply chains, adjusting to remote working and a lot of frantic excel contingency planning filed away as, 'normal.xlsx', 'bad.xlsx', 'really_bad.xlsx', 'really_bad_v2.xlsx', 'worst_case_scenario.xlsx' all keeping me busy and pre-occupied. By Week 2, pre-empting the coming frustration, I felt it prudent to set myself some unoriginal isolation productivity goals - learn the piano, make sourdough, finally do some yoga, fix up the garden. Week 3, that was my peak. For 7 whole days, I was a sourdough baking, piano learning, hedge-pruning machine. I even ordered an expensive yoga mat and thought about doing some yoga.
Towards the end of Week 4, it started to go downhill. The piano has been a relative success. I am still struggling through beginner lessons after work but I am certainly not the isolation maestro that I had pictured. It was the baking that really did it for me. After baking the heaviest, most dense loaf of sourdough Instagram has ever seen, I watched on eagerly as Molly took her first bite. "Mmmm yum," she proclaimed, with a thinly veiled frown on her face. In that second, I realised what I enjoy about baking is just the eating bit. With a newfound appreciation for the effort and skill that goes into bread making, I retired by proofing basket and vowed never to complain about the price of a posh loaf again.
My frustrations and boredom with isolation are of course, absolutely trivial given the wider context. However, as we head towards Week 7, I have been reflecting a little bit on why I've struggled with it. Unfortunately, these reflections have not led to anything uniquely profound. But, I think it is the 'coming home' that I miss. Even though our studio is only a ten-minute walk away from where we live, we would still physically go to work and come home each day. Aside from friends and family, it is the small bits of routine that became the bookends of my day that I have craved. Going to the gym, picking up a coffee on the way to the office, walking home, going through the door and changing into something more comfortable.
The thing is, at the same time as so many boundaries have been enforced on us outside the home, this has removed many of the boundaries inside the home. Along with an appreciation of the little things we took for granted that we used to get to do in the wild, I have come to appreciate home not just for the new hidden little corners of light that previously went unnoticed, but for the things that didn't happen at home.
So as I pack up my yoga mat to return and come to terms with a short-lived and failed baking career; I am, as I'm sure many of you are, looking forward to once again celebrating life at home for what it should be - a place to come back to.
x stay safe
Joel