Navigating Your Way Forward

Mother with babyI don’t know about you, but during this COVID-19 time, I have found it a great time to think and reflect. Reflect on my life. Reflect on my parenting, how our kids are travelling and their resilience. Reflect on my hopes for the future.

For some people, it was a time of incredible balancing – work, life, family, schooling, trying to source toilet paper, caring for elderly parents and the list could go on. For some people, there hasn’t really been time to consider deeply the changes and issues associated with the required changes.

Personally, I have found this time to be a blessing. We were already homeschooling so we didn’t have a huge adjustment in that area like most families. We had been living a chaotic lifestyle of afterschool activities and travelling 45 minutes to church and church-based activities several times each week. Every evening we had an activity so spending an evening together as a family was hard. It was not often when we were all together around the family dinner table.

COVID-19 time has brought out some great, and some not so great, aspects within our family. We have had more time together, struggled with more conflict, celebrated well, enjoyed creating different recipes, tried to find space so that everyone could be on different zoom calls at once, tried to balance everyone’s needs and demands etc.

As we look to the future and some bans start to be lifted, I am conscious that we could very easily fall back into the same routines we had before. Even though we say we want to change various aspects of family life, unless we make a concerted effort, we can slip back into our old routines. Once sport, dance, Airforce cadets and junior fire brigade starts back up, our evenings and early mornings can become chaotic again.

Thus, I am currently reflecting on how we can maintain a balance in our lifestyle.

What about you? What are your thoughts?

Our family are going to sit down and explore the following questions:

  • What has been the best part of the isolation time?
  • How have you grown during this time?
  • What have you learnt about yourself during this time?
  • What things have you not enjoyed during this time or missed from your life?
  • What changes in our lifestyle from this time do you want to keep?
  • How are we going to implement the changes we want to keep/make?

The areas our family will be focussing on in more detail include:

  • Family time
  • Work
  • Our use of time (especially watching tv)
  • Time intentionally spent with God
  • Exercise
  • Mealtimes
  • Meetings and the potential use of more Zoom calls etc instead of in-person
  • Socialising
  • Use of money/assets
  • Time spent travelling
  • Schooling
  • Activities / sport / dance / Air Force Cadets / Junior Fire Brigade
  • Intentional kindness towards neighbours and other less fortunate people
  • Our reduced impact on the environment

I would love to know how you plan to maintain the great things from this time that you have already implemented in your lifestyle. Just as it was a huge challenge for most people adapting to the isolation restrictions, it can be a huge challenge navigating entering back into the hectic lifestyle we once had.