I can’t say too much has changed about myself during quarantine. 2019 was a tough year for me. A week prior to Canada’s coronavirus lockdown, I had ruptured a tendon in my middle finger, and that made life very difficult for me (my career relies on my ability to use my hands). So to me, the solitude that 2020’s social isolation demanded wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.
Social deprivation aside, quarantine has brought out characteristic extremes in me. It has pushed me to do the things I’ve left on the back burner for a long time. Its also given permission to certain hedonistic aspects of myself to take front seat from time to time in order to cope.
What was a really nice breath of fresh air was the fact that I didn’t have any real excuses for not being able to do something.
Time is all we have
If you don’t know by now: time is all we have — and that’s something I try my best to remind myself often. To say “there’s not enough time,” or “I don’t have time,” what do we really mean when we say that?
We are born, and at that very moment, the clock to our inevitable demise starts ticking. It’s a sobering thought — but between birth and death, our life is tethered to time. We are alive, therefore we have time. In that vein of thought it appears to me that any living that we do is a celebration of the possibilities that time has granted us.
Quarantine pushed me to really pay attention to the common platitudes we all say and accept as normal. During lockdown, time based excuses had no value to them any more. I took solace in that — it made me admit to myself the real reasons why I didn’t do the things I said I wanted to do, but didn’t act on.
Say what you mean, and mean what you say
Which leads me here: quarantine has shone a light on a weakness of mine that I feel like as a millennial, we openly embrace. The flaky attitude that plagues the mentality of this generation.
I really look up to people from a bygone era who kept their promises. “You are only as good as your word.” For those who lived by these words, I feel like it gave them an extra edge. As I progress through life, I find that I’m appreciating the qualities of trustworthiness and dependability more and more.
When we make plans with somebody else, we aren’t just setting aside time which we can utilize for ourselves in other ways. We are also making mental space for them. The anticipation of spending our time and energy to be with somebody else has an element of effort to it. Not everybody is cut from the same cloth. Every individual carries their own baggage with them. Some might even wear their emotions.
I’ve made an effort to live by my word. Not doing so leaves me in a state of cognitive dissonance — a huge waste of my energy and time.
Life is how you use your time and energy
You can get so much more done when you have an abundance of energy. You have the opportunity to do so much more, when you have more free time.
Quarantine has removed certain time restrictions that made up the fabric of our previous reality. Many of us no longer travel to work. Some of us have been forced to remodel our lives because we’ve been laid off. Whatever the case may be, for a blip in time, we found ourselves having an abundance of it.
Since quarantine, I’ve found myself accomplishing something new almost every month. I started writing, I did a water fast for 10 days to raise money and awareness for homelessness, I learned how to design and create my own website, I trained like a marathon runner for a month, I joined a startup for a healthcare app (and then quit), I managed to get a contract position with a small business managing their website content among other things.
For the most part, quarantine had left me feeling determined to tackle personal projects I had put off. Following my 10 day fast with exercising everyday had my energy levels feeling at an all time high.
Having an abundance of energy takes effort to maintain. I can tell you right now as I’m writing this, I am nowhere as close to how I felt when I was on a strict exercise routine. The amount I could get done during then, compared to now definitely felt like a lot more.
Whatever the case may be there, life happened a lot more when I had energy to expend. Having free time and making the choice to utilize it in a productive way for long term gains added quality to future-Calvin’s life.
I have quarantine to thank for the mindset shift I made. I’ve learned to celebrate every victory, small or big, embrace opportunity, and make the time I’m given count.
