Lockdown Month in Review

My last day in the office, before we began the social distancing lockdown to fight the novel coronavirus, was March 13.  So today marks the beginning of the second month confined largely to home with my family of six.  What has it been like?

1.  Pre-lockdown life was way too busy.  In addition to the "jet lag" problem that I wrote about earlier, our family online calendar used to look like a colorful contemporary art piece, with multiple events for multiple people every day.  All of that got eliminated overnight.  Some of it we miss (kids soccer games, monthly dinner out with our supper club); a lot of it we don't.  In fact, I think a lot of our activities we were involved in just to keep us from being bored at home.  Now we know we aren't bored at home, so hopefully we will be more selective once the lockdown ends.

2.  There is freedom in the structure of routine.  We value our routine that we have fallen into:  set meal times (approximately set:  we aren't running a monastery or naval ship), daily exercise breaks, plenty of time for school and work, nightly entertainment.  Having a routine eliminates decisions (what time should we eat?) which reduces stress.  Within the routine, though, there is lots of freedom for when school and work gets done.

3.  We like our family meal times.  my wife and I have been eating lunch outside in the sunshine every day.  Now that no one has activities in the evenings, all six of us linger longer at the dinner table.  (Longer is relative:  15 minutes instead of kids dashing off as soon as their food is chewed and swallowed.)  For some reason, there has been much less strife among the kids since the lockdown began, even though the college student really wishes he weren't here.

So now we are starting to think about life after lockdown, assuming it begins to lift in a month or so.  What should we add back to our schedules?  How can we maintain some of the good vibes we have now?

Jet Lag

One very minor upside to the social distancing quarantines we've been under for two weeks now:  I can find time to start writing again.

Week three of social isolation is underway, a long enough time that I can start to draw some conclusions about my "old" life.  I already wonder if I will ever go back to a daily driving commute--this walk up the stairs after breakfast is a lot less stressful than a typical Atlanta rush hour, and my productivity certainly hasn't dropped and might even be higher.  Most of my work days are spent on the phone and computer anyway, and my department is spread across the country, so it should have been predictable that remote working isn't that much different from office working for me.  (I'm lucky that my kids are old enough to be self sufficient at their home schooling, and that I have a wife who doesn't work outside the home and keeps the household running flawlessly.)

On the unpredictable side, I have been most surprised to find that I'm sleeping each night much better than I was before the lockdown.  Not more, necessarily, but better, deeper, more restorative sleep.  I have changed nothing else in my diet or routine to deliberately chase sleep; I would have though I was sleeping soundly before.  But the difference is enough to be noticeable, and I've been reflecting on why this could be.  The best idea I've had is that it corresponds to the sudden shutdown of my usual peripatetic travel schedule.  Is it possible I had been living in a steady state of jet lag?

I was not regularly jet-lagged in the traditional sense of my body clock being off by a few time zones.  Most of my business travel takes place in my home EST time zone or the neighboring CST that is one hour behind.  But what my travel lacked in distance was perhaps made up for in frequency:  according to Delta, I flew 83 flight segments in 2019, which is over 40 round trips.  Thanks to the fact that my home airport, ATL, is the busiest in the world with direct flights to dozens of cities, I am fortunate to frequently be able to make day trips for meetings.  Sometimes I might have two days like that in a week; occasionally they will be back-to-back so that I get home late one evening then get up early the next morning and head straight back to the airport.  Sometimes the return flights are late, so that I get to bed an hour or two later than normal.  In between trips, there are regular work days and kids activities and social outings, etc.  Many of us know what this business (or "busy-ness") looks like--and many have it worse than I do.

For three weeks now, all of this has come to a sudden and complete halt.  No rushing around, no extra  activities, no flights.  Instead, our family has settled into a fairly steady routine, with fairly regular meal times, a little outdoor exercise each day, and to bed at about the same time every night.  Some of what we've lost in outside socializing we are making up with family time together, playing games and watching movies.  And presto, I'm sleeping more deeply than I have in years.

My conclusion:  I was jet lagged--not so much by actual jet travel, but by the incessant activity that seems to be the steady state operating model for most American professionals and their families.  I wasn't always crossing time zones, but I was compressing and shifting my perception of time through constant motion of mind and body.  Now, without all that rushing around, my mind has finally caught up with my body, I'm sleeping better, and I feel great.

So here's what I'm contemplating as I sit at home:  in two weeks or two months or whenever the social distancing protocols begin to relax and "normal" life begins to restart, how far back to the old ways will I allow myself to get?  I can't, and don't want to, stay sequestered at home forever--monasticism is not for me, and I'm too young to retire.  But is there a point somewhere between sheltering in place and the restless rush of relentless motion that would find me contributing fully to my job, home, and community, while still allowing me to sleep very well at night?  I wonder.