Less than two months ago, I attended an open house for my fourth grader. She showed off her class work in a room bustling with parents who had frantically squeezed this much-loved activity into their hectic schedules. The annual music concert followed, and, for a brief moment, life outside paused, and the performance became the center of attention. And then everyone carried on as normal. Briefly. 

Two days later, on March 12th, the school closed its doors for what would ultimately be the rest of the academic year. Email in-boxes filled with cancellations. Parents were advised – and then forced – to work from home, and life as we know it started to look vastly different. Color-coded calendar entries were obvious by their absence as families adjusted to a world without a rigid timetable. The lack of structure was unnerving at best, and for many, overwhelming. 

It quickly became apparent that, as a society, we aren’t comfortable with just ‘being’. We’ve become so ingrained in living by schedules that we’ve forgotten how to be flexible. But what happens when the schedule vanishes, almost overnight? It takes a while to consider that – for those who are safe and healthy – this could be a blessing in disguise.

Five years ago this month my family and I moved from England to the East Coast. The move felt safe (my husband and I lived near Boston for four years previously), but I wasn’t prepared for the sea change in my daily routine. I went from having a full agenda each week to literally nothing. No friends, no family, and no local knowledge of the district we now call home. I was forced to take a breath and rebuild our world. I attended every community gathering, chatted with every person I met at the local coffee shop, I even went on ‘blind dates’ with people I’d been introduced to through social media because they had a child the same age as mine, until we created new habits to live by.

By the time we celebrated our first Thanksgiving, I was an active volunteer, my children had discovered summer camps, and we’d all made friends. We’d established a new norm. We blended into the crowd of other busy people rushing from here to there, filling every day to the maximum, and barely keeping up. But we were having fun, right?

I share this story because, until now, it was the only time we’d been handed an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, and we missed it. We filled our days and weeks with more of the same. Okay, some of our activities look different here than they did across the pond, but the point remains the same. We are overstretched, over-scheduled, and over-committed. 

Before the stay-in-place order was issued, I attended a number of seminars by anxiety specialist, Lynn Lyons. I was deeply affected by her message to SLOW DOWN. (Yes, in upper case.) I started asking myself how to take a break in the non-stop cycle that we’ve become used to. How do we accept letting some things go to do a few things better?

Fast forward to present day and we are all faced with a blank page. The early challenge was to manage the change: how to go from speeding ahead to a standstill. But now that we’ve had time to adjust to circumstances beyond our control, I’m taking a bigger step back and asking what really matters to us. What do we really miss, and what can we live without?

As a family, we miss our friends, but we are enjoying the extra time that we have together. Everything from eating a meal at the same time to having unstructured breaks to go with the flow is a bonus. 

Which makes me wonder, when the time comes, what we will put back in place and what we will be prepared to let go? Are we learning these lessons just to lose them when our world re-opens? Will we look back on this time, much like we did five years ago, and think that we missed an opportunity to shift gears? 

The message to slow down is, for me at least, loud and clear. While everyone does their best to keep themselves and others safe in these uncertain times, it’s easy to forget the simple pleasures. Maybe we no longer need some of the things that we don’t have right now and can do very well with less in the long run. Maybe it’s enough to have our health and each other, and we can give ourselves the permission and strength to let some things go.

Maybe, if we stop and think before refilling our schedules, we can learn from these lessons before we lose them.