Do We Really Want To Go Back To Normal?

It happened really fast. The feeling of opening my calendar and being completely overwhelmed. I haven't felt like this in so long. I almost forgot how before COVID each Monday morning, I would stare at my calendar and say out loud. If I can just get through this week, I'll be good. Welcome to episode 43 where I asked the question. Do we really want to go back to normal? This episode is sponsored by Nickerson. A full service, branding, marketing, and PR and communications agency with team members in Boston. LA. Miami and New York city visit them@nickersoncos.com. I Set that line almost every Monday morning. If I can just get through this week. I'll be good. You see. I packed every day of my schedule. So tight meeting to meeting to lunch, to coffee, to happy hour to event post event. Each day filled with hustle. My weeks were planned out months in advance. My schedule is so crazy that Chris and I had our 10th wedding anniversary pictures taken a month after. Our 12th anniversary. It took us two years to find a date that we could both make to have our pictures taken. This week as I scheduled meeting, after meeting booking events all the way into November and having to decline events cause I was already booked for that day. I thought back to an article that I posted on LinkedIn on May 5th, 20, 20, 13 months ago. This was the article. Sunday night, I slept with the windows open. The first time this spring I've done. So. In the morning, I didn't need my alarm. You'd have thought I had somehow mistakenly made my bed within the fourth canopy of the rainforest judging by the cacophony of bird calls, just outside my window. I've since heard it referred to as the Dawn chorus. The noise outside the bedroom window is slightly different from the first condo Chris and I bought together. Or the sound of a hydraulic bus lift with wrench me from sleep every morning, around four 30. Our condo was 600 square feet. If you counted the two closets, then it was always hot. Having no control over the heat, we would keep the windows open even through the dead of winter. Eventually I got used to the sound of the bus outside the window. We poured all of our savings into buying those 600 sweltering square feet. So I was surprised when a month later Chris asked me to marry him. I was surprised because having just bought our condo, we didn't have any money left to plan a wedding. So we saved. For almost two years. In those two years, we learned a lot about what was important and what wasn't, what was worth spending money on like an open bar for our friends. And what we could do without. The bagpipe players. Chris really wanted to have a live band at our wedding. Unfortunately, we didn't have the money for it. So I sold my car. It needs a car in the city anyways. Right? During this time. I remember thinking to myself how much easier life would be if we just had more money, if we didn't live paycheck to paycheck. And if we had a bigger condo, if we didn't have to make sacrifices every day, When we were in it. Struggling to pay our mortgage, selling my car, to help pay for our wedding. Wondering if I could afford to splurge on Brie cheese at the grocery store. I never thought I'd look back on that time in our lives and think how great it was. But I do. Somehow that time seems so much simpler than the life we were living before. COVID-19. You see, we eventually moved out of those 600 square feet. Bought a house rescued a couple of dogs. And started two companies. We no longer lived paycheck to paycheck and I could afford all of the French cheese, my heart desired. But we gave up something in the process. Time. Both of us worked so much that we didn't have a lot of extra time to enjoy what we had built. I am by no means happy that we are living through a global pandemic, but I am trying to find the silver lining. Perhaps my silver lining is that it is forced me to slow down to not live my life at warp speed. To take the time to bake bread. Plant seeds. Going really long walks with the dogs and yes. Listen to the birds. These are unbelievably hard times, but perhaps when this is over years down the road, we will look back and discover something good happened during this time. That we've rediscovered time. And that may be. It wasn't all that bad. I went back and re-read this article over and over again this week, because I want to learn from the past 15 months, I want to remember to leave breathing room in my schedule. I want to enjoy all the things that we work so hard for it. And I want to do it without. Feeling guilty. Yes. There are so many things from my pre COVID life that I love and have NIST so terribly and I am so glad that they are coming back. But there were also things that needed re-evaluation and reprioritization. I'm so glad that I wrote that article a year ago to remind me, you see, memory is a slippery thing. There was an Andy Warhol quote that says, they always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. I think that's the rub. What do we want to change as we go back? And what boundaries have we created that we want to keep? I hate the term new normal. But I think in this scenario, it fits. I want to go back to normal in the sense that I want to be able to do all the things that we could do before COVID, but within that, I'll want to define a new normal one in which I don't look at my schedule every Monday and say, if I can just get through this week, I'll be good. I encourage you to take a look at what you want, your new normal to be going forward. I'm sure there are parts that will and should look different from the old normal. So we're on the other side of Memorial day. We've officially kicked off the summer. And you know what that means. It's porch pounder time. What's a porch pounder you ask. Well, for me, it's a wine that isn't too complicated. It's gotta be low alcohol and. It shouldn't break the bank. For me this week. It's Josh sellers, Sauvignon Blanc. It's really good. I bought a bottle at trader Joe's the other day for 13 bucks and I liked it so much. I went back and bought some more. It's crisp and clean with a hint of lemon and apple on the nose. And it's 13.2% ABV which yet technically I could have picked out something in the 12.5 range to be a really low ABV porch pounder. Uh, but I really love this wine. What's your go-to porch pounder. Let me know, so I can check it out. Okay friends, that's it for me this week. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Please share this podcast with your friends. If you like it, please review it on iTunes and subscribe. And until next week. Cheers.