THE NEW NORMAL FOR THE TIME BEING

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything here.  Usually life seems to whiz by at record speed and it seems that I have a never-ending list of things I want to get accomplished on any given day.  Granted, what I have written down are not all “chores”, there are also what I consider “fun” things.  And some of my fun things take a lot of time to do, and there are only so many hours in a day.  But in the blink of an eye myself and millions of others have suddenly found ourselves with an abundance of time on our hands.  And a good portion of that time is being spent in our own homes away from others.

If you’ve been reading my blog you know that my husband and I love to travel the world.  We’ve been fortunate enough to be doing this for 17 years now.  Our travels have taken us to some far-flung exotic places too, like visiting the Potala Palace in Tibet, staying in a kibbutz on the Golan Heights in Israel, spending the night in a Muslim farmer’s home in Turkey, or hiking part of the Annapourna Circuit in the mountains in Nepal.  These are just a small example of where our travels have taken us.

But all of a sudden we find our wings have been clipped and we are grounded indefinitely, though we are certainly not alone in this experience.  Our trip down under that we had been planning for a year and a half is kaput.  Instead of packing our bags and flying off to explore somewhere new, we are staying at home.  Thank goodness home is a wonderful place to be.

My life has slowed down considerably and I now find I have a lot more time to pursue not only my “fun” activities but also my “chores”.  My house has never been cleaner either!  Instead of working out daily at the gym I’m now taking walks in my community.  Walking in the fresh air is not only good for my health but it clears my head and settles my mind.  We’re all living in a stressful, uncertain time and when I’m outside exercising I can momentarily forget what’s going on.

Without the social engagements that I normally have written on my calendar I have a lot more time to pursue my interests.  Being a passionate quilter I have enough projects, ideas, and fabric to last a lifetime!  Now I have the time to really get things done.

I’ve also rediscovered my long-ago interest in genealogy research.  It is so much easier now with almost everything available at your fingertips.  The family tree I started researching awhile back has been growing quite well with the information I’ve been able to gather recently.  This takes a lot of time that I didn’t want to devote before, but now it seems that I have nothing but time.

Something else that I enjoy doing is cooking.  I'm what you might call a creative cook too.  I use recipes for a lot of my meals but I also like to experiment with the ingredients I have on hand and create new dishes.  The majority of the time the results are very good.  Without being able to eat out knowing how to cook is vital.

While we are all spending more time at home we don't need to feel isolated. There’s still the phone and internet to keep in touch with friends and family so our connections to each other don’t suffer.  Besides that I have a husband who’s my best friend so staying at home together is just fine with me.  After all these years together we never seem to run out of things to talk about either.  I feel really lucky.

I know that someday this will all be over and life will get back to some kind of normalcy while the country tries to heal.  In the meantime I will try to use this extra time wisely and accomplish some of the things I’ve been putting off doing. And hopefully in the next couple of years I will be writing here about our trip “down under”.

African quilt finally finished.  Designed and created after my first trip to Africa in 2011.