Day Forty-Six – My New Normal
I am awake, I am alive, and this morning I am smiling as I accept that my life has now comfortably settled into a “new normal”.
Once upon a time, in a time that now seems eerily distant, my career was made up of three types of “days”, namely Paper Work Days (days in office, prepping for an upcoming seminar), Travel Days (flying or driving to said seminar location), and Seminar Days (days in which I was actually delivering a seminar whether in a First Nation community, a municipality, or a city).
With the pandemic announcement and the Ontario State of Emergency declaration, seminars rapidly disappeared along with their related travel and prep days. Like many, it took awhile for me to navigate these previously unknown waters but navigate I did, until I arrived at … today.
Life is once again a comfortable routine for me, with my career now made up of only TWO distinct days. Paper Work Days weathered the storm, with the only adjustment being that I now prep for online courses as opposed to in-person offerings. Travel Days have disappeared for the foreseeable future but even more exciting, is how Seminar Days have now pivoted, morphed, and grown into “Shooting Days” (days in which the main focus is to shoot videos, whether they be Teaching Tuesday videos, Surviving Isolation videos, videos for my own seminars OR videos for a course I have designed for the agencies or communities I continue to support).
Today, I am smiling, because today is a Shooting Day as I leap into the final stages of the creation of a Video Training Course, specifically designed for AETS. This course iwill see students receiving an instructional video each Monday. Each video includes a homework assignment that reinforces the lessons for that week. No printing required. No students stressing out over ink. Rather this homework is completed simply by hitting forward on the email sent (the one that includes the video), answering the questions contained in the body of the email, and then hitting send, effectively forwarding the email and the homework to the Program Coordinator. In this way, assignments can not only be graded but student participation can be logged as well.
Win-freakin-win.
So this is me, smiling. I like this new world and soon I pray I will live in one that involves both online and in-person offerings because that kinda life is one I have dreamed of for ages. This isolation simply gave me the time to make dreams come true.
I pray you too have adjusted my friend. I pray you too have found a comfortable “new normal” and I pray that like me, aspects of your new normal will become a part of your post-pandemic normal, whenever that day arrives.
We got this my friend. You got this.
I believe in you.
And I love you! HUGSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Sandi