New community, new job, new neighborhood, new colleagues, new processes, new transit routes, new schools, new friends, new climate, new recreation, new politics (maybe not so much), and the overall adjustments that need to happen simultaneously. It’s amazing how adaptable we are when we move to a new city.
So what’s the big deal in adapting to the newness of the world facing emergence from lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic? If we were to move to a new town and a new job, we would be facing adaptations of a much larger scale. What makes moving to a new city easier, is the fact that the need to leave the old behind, and to take up the new is inescapable because nothing is the same. Adapting to the changes brought about from the strategies deployed to arrest the SARS-CoV-2 virus kept us in the same location, with the same circle of friends, and with the same familiar neighborhoods, but the dynamics of routine have been altered, some or many but not all. This puts us in the unwelcomed situation of trying to figure out just what is the same and what is different. That’s a different kind of change.
The more we objectively call out and claim the features that are the same, the more solid a footing we have for dealing with the things that are different. Maybe, as we navigate our routines, we should say out loud to whomever is listening (even if it’s just ourselves) those welcomed familiar and routine people, places, things that are comfortable and predictable. This will signal to us that despite declarations that, “the world has changed”, in fact, much of what we were about is still very much in place. Move forward from there. And don’t forget to bring a mask.
