My COVID Times Diary – Silver Lining

Behind every silver lining, there’s a cloud. ~ Glenn Gould

originally posted 7/7/2020

So I’ll be honest, I’ve really hated all the advertising during the pandemic.  All of the ads from companies telling us how they are with us, how they care.  The donations they are making are good, but honestly billion dollar companies giving a couple of million dollars doesn’t impress me, I’m happy they’re doing it but it doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy about them.  I’ve appreciated the really honest ones, Lays did an ad that basically said, this all sucks but eating chips makes you feel better.  I bought a bag that night.  One ad that I saw, and honestly I forget what for, had one teen talking about how his family has been eating dinner together every night.

So it got me thinking, there are very, very few things that have no positive attributes.  So what are the silver linings of the pandemic?  The first and a snarky answer is that in many ways it’s an introverts paradise.  I was talking with another introvert a couple of weeks ago about how it’s nice that people are avoiding us, normally that’s our job.  But on a more serious note, for the last twenty years we have been hearing about the promise of the paperless office.  The fact is, we’ve had the technology to do this for years, but people are resistant to change, and don’t trust technology.  So they keep backup hard files, create paper copies that they then scan into PDFs instead of just creating PDFs in the first place.   Offices have refused to take electronic signatures, demanding wet signatures on hard copies.  Well, with all of us working from home and no longer able to walk paper copies around offices and campuses, we’ve had to make the move.  It has certainly been painful, people don’t have the type of technical know how we think they do, mostly because we haven’t made them get proficient.  But now we’re there and I’m happy as hell about it, once we get people up to proficiency and they get into the routine and rhythm of it all, things will be much better.

For me personally at home, working from home, I’m able to be much healthier.  This situation has allowed me to routinely practice intermittent fasting.  Which means me for me, fasting for 16 hours a day, and eating in an eight hour window.  Without drive times or gyms, I’ve been working out at home and it’s been easier to get into a routine and be far more consistent.  Without treadmill access I started running in March, something I truly hate, but is necessary for me to get my cardio levels up and keep my blood pressure down.  Since we’ve started this work at home experiment I’ve lost five pounds and dropped my very bad glucose levels down 70 points.  So this work at home thing is actually good for me.

I put a request out to friends tonight on Facebook to see what other silver linings they are seeing.  Their answers were interesting and all over the place.  There were some of the bigger things environmental improvement, more awareness of issues.  Some not so big things as well, catching up on Netflix shows, organizing houses and closets, learning how to cook or cook new things.  Some of the expected things showed up including time with family, eating dinner together and time to play with kids.  Lots of discussion of new skills or picking up old habits, learning a new language.

The two that I thought were the most significant involved connection and pace of life.  People talked about connecting to family across the country via Zoom, I actually got to watch my niece’s high school graduation via Zoom.  One friend said that a group of college friends had reconnected over a Zoom book club and were in better touch than they had been for years.  A number of people talked about slowing down, seeing life at a slower pace, something I’ve advocated for on this blog in several posts.

So, even in the middle of a terrible pandemic, just in America over 125,000 people have died, millions who have been ill, there are still silver linings.  Hope you have found a few for yourself. ~ Michael ‘Rev’ Kane