"I'm not sure I want things to go back to the way they were before..."

A very wise person admitted to me this week, “I’m not sure I want things to go back to the way they were before…”

And I agree.

Here are the things about life-under-COVID-19 that I like and don’t want to give up:

• I talk to my family way, way more often; I think I’ve talked to my mother more in the last month than in the last decade.
• Weekly Learning Seminar every Tuesday.
• I play Crazy 8s with Oliver after supper every night.
• I don’t need an alarm to wake me up: I can get up when I want (which, it turns out, is about the same time as I would wake up with an alarm).
• My Wednesday afternoon trips to the Farmacy to pick up my food order.
• My Friday drop-offs from Receiver Coffee and Purity Dairy.
• I’m much more aware of what’s in the fridge and in the pantry than I’ve ever been, and I treasure every bit of food much more.
• Prince Street is much, much quieter; often there are more bicycles and pedestrians than vehicles.
• No meetings. Well, the occasional Zoom meeting. But, generally, meeting-society is on hold. May it never return.
• No airplanes in the sky.
• I drive my car once a week. Now that summer’s coming, I could easily do without a car entirely. I’ve got nowhere to go!
• Same-day delivery from The Bookmark of books, stationery and pens.
• No tourists. No prospect of tourists.

More so than anything, though, the pace of life has slowed to the point where I can start to see patterns as never before.

I’m as anxious as the next person to have some degree of predictability in my life, for people without jobs to regain them, for people to stop getting sick and dying around the world; at the same time we’ve been granted a unique opportunity to look at how we live and to reconsider it. Let’s not let that opportunity escape us.