by Caroline Leach | Feb 28, 2021 | Social Media
We’re at about the one-year mark for our stay-at-home lives to stop Covid-19. There’s light of the end of the tunnel. People are wearing masks and socially distancing. Case positivity rates are dropping. More vaccine doses are becoming available.
And yet there’s also a sense of extreme fatigue. Time has taken on odd proportions. Days blend into nights. Days becomes weeks. Weeks become a year.
As I contemplated the month of March, a feeling of sameness crept in. All I saw on the calendar was work, work, and more work. Don’t get me wrong. I love the work. And I’m thankful to have it.
But life is not solely about work. It’s about people. It’s about enjoyment. It’s about the journey.
What was missing from my calendar were all of those times. Time with friends. Time for fun. Time to simply BE.
It’s time to take a break already. As humans we’re wired to work, play, and rest. When it gets out of balance, everything suffers.
What’s a fun break you will take today?
by Caroline Leach | Nov 30, 2020 | Social Media
As the adorable blue fish Dory said in the movie, Finding Nemo, when you’re lost and you don’t know where you’re going, just keep swimming.
That’s a great mantra for the strange and unprecedented year 2020 turned out to be. Everything is changing minute by minute. Change has always been in our lives. Yet before it was often imperceptible. Now, dynamic change sometimes feels like it’s happening every hour.
It’s in the shift to working from home, longer term. It’s in the shift in how we socialize virtually. It’s in practically every way we live our lives.
So if you feel lost, you’re not alone. No one really knows what will happen next. That can be scary. It can also open up a whole new world of possibilities. It’s a liminal moment — a transitional stage — where we’re betwixt and between the world as we knew it before Covid, and what the world will be like after it.
We still have agency in our own lives. We can pursue goals. We can connect with others. We can try new things. We can just keep going. What are you doing to keep swimming in this liminal time?
by Caroline Leach | Oct 31, 2020 | Leadership, Social Media
Is there hope on the other side of despair?
Yes, there is, says internet trend observer and investor Mary Meeker.
Mary and her team at Bond Capital released a report called Our New World in April of this year. It was about a month into our stay-at-home world to “flatten the curve” of the coronavirus.
The team “compiled observable trends that help form our views of the present and should provide insights into the future.” They are optimists, and rays of light are so welcome right now as we slog through this seemingly never-ending pandemic.
I added this report to the reading and discussion for the class I’m teaching (remotely) this fall at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. It’s called Managing Technologies for Digital Media in the MS program in Digital Social Media.
Here’s the crux of the report: “None of what we are going through is comfortable, or fair. And while things will likely get worse before they get better, has America, perhaps, just gotten the wake-up call it needed to get to a better place? Let’s hope so, and let’s find the best ways to get to the other side as quickly and thoughtfully as possible.”
Getting to the other side is the game we’re all playing now. What do we need to do to get through today? And tomorrow? And the next day? Many people are struggling with loneliness from quarantines. Some friends tell me it’s hard to get motivated or excited about much of anything these days. And many jobs have evaporated and many businesses are prohibited from operating at full capacity.
Our family restaurant, for example, is only allowed to use 10% of its available seats — the ones outdoors. If there’s any good news, it’s that we’re in Southern California and we don’t have cold winters like much of the rest of the country and the world. My heart goes out to restaurateurs in colder climates who are installing igloos to serve diners.
The phone rang last night near closing time after a busy Friday night of outdoor dining. The hosts had already departed. I eyed the phone warily, not eager to answer it after a long day of various work projects that started in the early morning hours. But I picked it up with as much cheer as I could muster.
“Hello,” the caller said, “I ordered takeout tonight.” Silently, I prayed that all had gone well. “I don’t usually do this,” the caller continued. “But I wanted to tell you our meal was outstanding.”
At this point I exhaled. And smiled. “Usually we think of takeout as being less than,” he said. “This was anything but. We have a dinner reservation in a few weeks, and we can’t wait to come in.”
Well, wow. Just wow. That someone took the time to call and share their experience and their thanks was something to be truly grateful for. It re-energized me late in the evening. I couldn’t wait to share the feedback with the team who had worked so hard to make the experience memorable.
This made me wonder. Are we all viewing life as “less than” right now? Something to be endured? A time to live in suspended animation as we collectively wait for “the other side” to materialize?
If the game we’re playing is getting through each day as best we can to get to a “new normal” (or whatever we’ll call our post-Covid world), how can we up our game? In my last post, I wrote about a feeling of progress every day and making note of what was accomplished. Often it’s much more than we thought.
To that, here’s a new practice to consider adding. What can we each do or say every day to encourage someone else? What uplifting words or feedback can we share, whether in a text, on a video call, or on social media?
Because our words might be just the thing that helps someone who’s feeling discouraged to carry on. To keep trying. To keep striving. To ultimately get to the other side.
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