Longing for the mundane

Today’s submission comes from Kai Heggelund, in Norway.

“This could be a nice time”, I thought, when I was sent to work from home, almost two weeks ago. “I can work more efficiently, I can skip all those boring and inefficient meetings, I don’t have to put up with all the disturbance from colleagues who are always interrupting my workflow.” 

Now, after ten days of working from our kitchen table, I am actually starting to miss my colleagues. The daily chats, the short conversations with the guy next to me about how best to solve the day’s tasks, the good lunch conversations, which can cover any and all mundane topics. 

We try to compensate with online meetings and phone calls. To a certain extent, these tools help, but not fully. 

The days merge into one another, workdays and weekends become one, morning and evening – all the same. My computer stays on the kitchen table, reminding me of all the tasks that are to be done, as soon as my breakfast has been devoured. 

I thought maybe I could go to our place in the mountains, and combine home office with beautiful ski trips. But because of the situation, unfortunately, the authorities put their foot down. Nobody is allowed to go to their holiday home, unless it’s in the same municipality as your home address. They imposed this restriction in order to protect the local villagers from the burden of living with hoards of tourists, who might get sick and spread the virus. 

So now, here I sit, at our kitchen table, longing to get out of isolation. It’s a comfort that my wife and I get a lot of time for just the two of us. We stay mostly inside in our little house, we have many good conversations over coffee, and we cook delicious food together. From time to time, we take the opportunity to go outside for little walks, as long as we keep a minimum distance of two meters from other people. Most of the time I spend planning for the time after Covid-19, which I hope will not be too far into the future. 

I try to take things one day at a time. I keep hoping that this emergency state will soon be over, and that we will get our normal life back.       

After all, the normal, trivial everyday life is best.