New Year. New You

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In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a bit of a shake-up in terms of how we live and work these past two years.

PS. Welcome to 2022!

January, 2020, saw us return to work after the festive break starting to see the impact and spread of Covid-19. We started thinking of and then planning for the closing of workplaces, hospitality, and schools. Everyone found themselves in a completely new and scary place – locked down at home, with or without family and friends, watching daily briefings and staring with disbelief at the news of the spread of this new killer.

January, 2021, was a different kind of New Year and perspective – it was almost a defiant return. Restrictions were in place but regularly ignored or flouted (one rule for the population, another for leaders or celebrities?), and a general sense of satisfaction that we’ve survived something major and we can now go ‘back to normal’. How wrong we were. How wrong we were being led, but how we longed for it to be real and the freedom it would provide.

If 2020 was all about learning what Covid-19 was and 2021 was all about trying to live with Covid-19, then 2022 will be about learning to accept Covid-19 in our daily lives and to work with it rather than around it. It is not going away and the sooner we realise it, accept it, and adjust to it, the sooner we can have confidence in our collective behaviour instead of name calling and/or needing anger management courses every time we see someone not wearing a mask. Covid-19 is not going away, there will be more variants throughout the year as we’ve seen before, and we need to accept it and live with it. We need to let the science lead us, inform us, and protect us … the politicians have shown all too often they’re willing to sacrifice us to the economic god rather than protect us, so we need to look out for ourselves and those around us, and do what we should, within the often confusing confines of government-imposed restrictions.

Yes, 2022 is going to be different again, but this time I think we’re better prepared for it.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash