In my working, pre-covid days, each morning I would encounter the same people and have a brief chat before I caught the bus. A man waiting in the lobby for his ParaTranspo pick up, the man walking his big dog, the pony tailed young woman returning from her run, the retired bus driver out for his morning walk, the woman playing fetch with her corgi.
All these encounters and more, that I took for granted were a pleasant start to my day. If I didn’t see one of them, I would wonder about their welfare and ask the next time I saw them. Likewise they often enquired about me.
After several months away from this, I do miss it. I don’t go out very much, due to bad legs, a condition and age that ups my covid risk, and of course, I am now unemployed.
How greatly, in small ways, our lives can change in an instant.
Even when they told us to close our office in March, we never foresaw this. We thought, oh, a couple of weeks and all will return to normal. We had no idea.
It isn’t just the big things that changed, like quitting my job of 15 years, but all the little things, like my daily routines and encounters that I didn’t pay much attention to.
I don’t long for the past by any means. I am still processing the shock of huge changes, adjusting to a new way of life I was not prepared for.
In a strange way however, not being ready has made this a grand adventure, where I have no idea of what the future holds. In the past, whenever I have made big changes I spent a long time planning and working them out. I am not a risk taker. This time, I had no plans, only vague ideas of what I might do with lots of time. And I certainly did not envision the changes in the daily small things.
Making this a grand adventure, from my own self inflicted house arrest keeps me from freaking out.