We can get used to anything
What do you want your life to look like? (Mural on the Atlanta Beltline by Addison Karl and Jarus; Image by lbstidham0)
I am a lightweight when it comes to caffeine.
My friends joke about how I get totally wired off of just a few sips of a cup of coffee. My cup is still sitting there, the liquid only an inch from the top, and I’m reorganizing the closet while having ten new business ideas — after writing fifty emails and two articles. And even if the consumption was in the morning, I might not sleep until the wee hours. Consequently, I limited caffeine to just once a week or so.
And then the pandemic happened, and I started drinking coffee almost every day. Not much, but enough to make existence seem a little less bleak. It wasn’t a magic productivity drug anymore — it was a survival mechanism.
And then, one day, I made some changes to my diet. I drank more water and added more vegetables, even at breakfast. I took my vitamins. As a result, I suddenly stopped having any interest in coffee. It just didn’t occur to me to drink it. There was no withdrawal, there was no taper. I was just done.
Despite the challenge inherent in changing our habits, there are moments when we can make dramatic shifts with relatively little effort. We just decide it’s going to be different one day, and it is. For proof, look around at your daily routine. A year ago, you probably didn’t think that you’d be putting your mask on as part of your grocery store trip, or canceling all business travel, or making do without the gym. And yet we accept our new reality, and we adjust to a new status quo.
Through this lens, I’m realizing additional changes that I can make that didn’t occur to me before. For five months, my car has been over a thousand miles away. Turns out, I don’t really need it. I guess it’s time to sell it. My husband and I went from a 3,000 square foot house with a pool to a 600 square foot apartment with no dishwasher — and we’re happier. It was a temporary move that we decided to make permanent, selling all of our furniture and keeping only what would fit into a small trailer.
There are so many things that we wish we could do — or make ourselves do — to be wealthier, healthier, more satisfied with ourselves. Is it possible that we can simply decide to do things differently, creating the life that we are longing for? In this time of great upheaval, maybe there is a crack in the facade of reality, allowing us to glimpse a different way forward for ourselves.
The streetscape in my community is a happy one, with masked pedestrians window shopping, restaurants and cafes putting tables out on the sidewalk and closed side streets, and artists painting colorful murals on the sides of buildings. This is the new normal; against all odds, it feels comfortable and sustainable. If we can get used to this, we can get used to anything. What will we choose that could make things better?
