Normalcy, or the semblance thereof

Well, things are pretty weird these days, as you know. And rather than write too much about the weirdness/scariness/whatever-ness of it all, I instead present to you the home-to-home commute — or, one way to stay (semi) sane when working from home.

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(safety first!)

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Like many people who haven’t outright lost their jobs these days, both James and I have been mostly working from home. (I say mostly because some of my work is individually field-based, and as long as travel is still okay and public lands are still open, I can still do some of that. But neither of us are regularly commuting to an office anymore.)

We manage to stay out of each other’s way pretty well while we’re working, I think — James has a nice setup on the second floor, and I’ve been working downstairs or on the porch.

And before work, we’ve been taking a sweet little commute loop, up the river and back down the other side, from home back to home, to make it feel like we’re still normal people getting normal exercise biking to work in the morning. Though it’s a different commute than either of us would ever take to get to either of our offices, it’s an elective route to go through pretty places and help both of us (maybe mostly me;) feel like regular humans.

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(one sunrise last week)

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It’s a sweet way not only to have intentional time together (outside, in fresh air, while moving our muscles, no less) but also to take some space between home and employment, to draw just the faintest bit of boundary, to give my brain that meditative, pedal-turning, fully-present spin before I buckle down.

I’m not sure it’s so important to James, but he’s been a good sport about my puppylike let’s-get-going early morning exuberance. Despite how hard it can be to get out of bed and out the door when we don’t “need” to, we had a really nice week of seeing the world wake up. And with this new commute comes all the excitement of learning new-normal things, like the piece of driftwood that looks like a llama, the beaver statue with its rotating offerings, and the osprey nest we go by every morning (no osprey yet;).

So, it’s not exactly “normal,” but it has the semblance of normality, and that’s pretty damn good right now.

What are you doing to feel normal these days?

2 Comments:

  1. Me? I’m trying to get out on the bike and take a walk on days that I don’t. (See forthcoming blog post.) I like the idea of the “non-commute bike commute”. I should try to do that, especially since I didn’t necessarily have to leave the house even before this whole pandemic business.

    • heh. Another normal kind of thing is reading your blog! ;) I see you wrote about biking and walking, which is awesome (thanks for keeping your adventures to not super crowded places!:)

      Actually, what I really wanted to say was that your comics are definite bright spots too, so I appreciate your continual posting of art and random life snippets:)

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