During this whole outbreak and what is starting to feel like house arrest, or what I would assume house arrest would feel like, there have been nonstop tweets, ig posts, Facebook articles and online challenges flooding the internet. If you’re like me, seeing all of this either makes you really anxious because you're realizing all over again that this thing is real, or just get aggravated because who the hell actually wants to be challenged to do push ups? Although there are a million things going on online, I think a lot of us have had enough time to develop an idea of how we feel about the entire situation.
Some realizations I have made during quarantine:
1- I really took outside for granted. I usually have a really busy schedule from waking up at 6am, driving to school, being there until 3 then driving to work, being there until 10pm, driving back home and doing homework until 1 in the morning. Everyday of the work week. Seriously. In between all that time throughout my day, I am walking from class to class or going outside to help at work or even watching the sun rise in the morning but now… now I stay inside of a tiny apartment, which I have come to discover is on the shady side of the complex, and only leave when it is for food or my endless search for toilet paper. Although my busy work weeks were insane, it still allowed me to see the sun, walk around in the fresh air, do homework with the wind blowing my paper around, now I don’t have any of that. Of course people have told me that going to the park is a way of getting outside and enjoying nature, I tried. I really did. When things weren’t so bad, me and my boyfriend (who I am quarantined with already..don't freak out) would go fishing and walking along the trails keeping our distance from everyone but to be fair there weren't that many people to distance ourselves from anyway. Now, going to the park almost seems like a crime. Dodging people at the now crowded park was more of a hassle than dealing with my boredom anyway. So I’ve been inside and as desperate as this sounds, checking the mail everyday is something that I’ve come to look forward to.
2- I never realized how much time I actually spent mindlessly scrolling through social media. Before all of this, I spent a lot of time doing something or being in transit so the only time I could ever really relax and mindlessly thumb through pictures, was on my lunch break at work. I always had the idea that I was spending hours and hours on my social media accounts when really, I was just using my phone for work or school. Now that I have endless hours on my hands to do whatever it is I feel like doing, I can rack up anywhere from 3 to 6 hours of time spent on my phone. Watching numbers of people tag their friends in the many new challenges that have surfaced, refreshing the feed to see if anything new has been posted since I was away from that specific app, staring blankly at the screen while seeing the endless tweets about being bored. This happens everyday for me now and I have come to the realization that because of this forced house arrest style of living, I have made myself addicted to these social apps. Is this because we all crave any kind of human interaction that we used to receive daily or is it because our phones are easy and accessible and are always there for us anyway so we have no understanding of how to do anything other than scroll?
3- something that has really been weighing on my mind is how little I take time to enjoy the little things. As kind of mentioned before, having the time between events to be outside and to watch the sunrise are things that seem so small in the big, busy, fast paced life. We are so consumed in our phones and other things that we think are important, until epidemics like this happen. On multiple accounts, I have heard people reconnecting with those they love, finding new and interesting talents and hobbies they never would have discovered had this not happened, and if you’re anything like me, taking the break that has been given to you. Do we as humans take for granted the little things in life so much that it takes a pandemic to bring us back down to Earth? Slowly, people are gaining their human-ness back. I see support everywhere I go, parks are filling and people are exercising in those parks, artists that didn’t realize they were artists are finding a new love for creating and building, I see posts on posts of people finding their way back to their religion. All of this human-ness lost in the fast paced society, finally finding its way back to where it belongs.
"When you decide to float and not cause waves, that’s when you have failed” (Professor Steven Vrooman, Texas Lutheran University). Finding our way back to our human-ness, whichever way it may be, is probably the most important lesson to learn throughout this pandemic. Remembering the little things that matter, connecting ourselves to the ones we love, prioritizing things and people that mean the most and making waves are where priorities need to lie.
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