On Thursday at about 1:09pm I received a note from a friend who asked “are we still meeting?” I wrote back and said, “yes, looking forward to it”. We had scheduled a Zoom call on Friday at 1pm. He wrote back asking if the Zoom link was working.
A moment later he wrote back saying he had spent the whole day thinking it was Friday. Doh.
Lockdown is blurring our days. They feel the same. Some people have decided to just go with it - that typically means working 7 days a week and just allowing each day to have exactly the same look and feel to it.
One of my daughters who is studying at university has decided that instead of doing 6 hours a day for 5 days in the week (they’re expecting around 30 hours a week of engagement at the university), she’d prefer to do 4 hours a day 7 days a week, with a bit extra here and there.
Personally, I’ve been working harder than I’ve worked ever. But I am feeling I would do better with something to break up the monotony. I think we are designed as human beings to have a rhythm to our lives, our years, our months and our weeks. The seasons change, the moon waxes and wanes, the weekend comes around every week. These things are regular cycles, and their rhythm provides a foundation of both change and consistency.
I think we need to try and find some kind of rhythm during Lockdown. It can’t be the old rhythms, but we can’t abandon the concept of a regular pattern of change and consistency altogether. Maybe you can’t take the weekend off anymore, but what can you do to mark different days of the week? We need new rhythms and rituals to mark the Lockdown life we are in.
In our house, we’ve made Friday nights pizza nights (I tried to also make them Fancy Fridays and get everyone to dress up smart, but the family didn’t want that). We’ve spent time on Sunday afternoon having a devotion and singing together. We could probably do more to create rhythms and mark the passing of the weeks.
What have you and your Lockdown partners done to mark the passing of days and weeks and build new rhythms and rituals into your Covid disrupted lives?
Komen