Two years passt

Things will not go back to how they were before. That time has gone. There already is a ‘new normal’. New skills have had to be learned.

Every day I learn from people and occasionally have the privilege of teaching people. I think it takes a week in front of a screen on video calls to match a day in a classroom, learning from others, questioning, and building relationships in and out of the classroom. In some ways, it can never be matched.

For those in education, there is a block of time that will always be missing. A block of experience and growth.

Without the need to travel to work, base-level exercise is reduced. A core foundation of 10,000 steps was reduced to 1,000. Muscles atrophy, and injuries happen. It takes time to get this back to where it was.

Conversations become linear, even with group calls, sideline mutterings become private messages, and the dynamic completely changes. Someone once told me that a lot gets decided in the ‘meeting before the meeting’ and the ‘meeting after the meeting’. For the last two years, these before and after meetings have disappeared.

The virus itself has taken so many. People who should be with us for decades to come are gone, lives stolen short.

It is not just the pandemic that has done this.

Years of building up communities in Ukraine are destroyed in a matter of minutes as are the once peaceful minds of civilians involved.

But it is not all bad. Many have spent more time with loved ones and less time commuting.

The new normal will continue to shape. There is hope.

We cannot get the two (or ‘ten’) years back but we have seen a glimpse into a world that didn’t exist before. We have memories of a time that never came before, we can take our experiences and make a better ‘new normal’.

Education changes, exercise changes, as does the world in these times. We have the chance to make a better ‘normal’ than the ‘normal’ before all of this. Let’s hope that we do.