Jan 12, 2021
The working from home soup
In a way, the fall of 2020 was the easiest time of the year for me. Well, not the easiest — I was working harder than I had been all year. Maybe “the most routine” would be a more appropriate epithet (and I do love routines). Since I had been working from home for several months at that point, I was used to the daily schedule and Christmas was looming in the not too distant future. With the holidays coming up, and with them the promise of a few days off, it was easier to buckle down and work.
Now it’s 2021. A new year where almost everything is the same, yet feels quite different. The holidays have come and gone; the promised prize of gift-giving, sleep-ins and Christmas food is spent. The pandemic is still ongoing, but the timeline feels less clear now — and the locked down and socially distant future more infinite than ever before. And back to work I go, so to speak. Working from home is still the national recommendation, and so I’m not really going anywhere. I’m just changing where I sit in my apartment, and switching out video games and Netflix binges for Zoom calls and emails.
Perhaps I thought the sense of familiarity would make it easier to go back to work after the holidays. After all, it takes a lot less effort to just climb out of bed and shuffle over to my desk on the first morning back at work, than it does to actually get dressed and head to the office. Alas, come the last Sunday of Christmas vacation I felt the same dread as always — perhaps even worse than usual. The uncertainty of the new year and the certainty of the year-old pandemic weighing heavily on everything I do.
There was a time not that long ago when I would clamor for a day working from home. It was a bit like my craving for soup. I’m not a soup-y person; I don’t find it very filling, and usually pretty bland — but sometimes I just crave it. And when I had soup I would savor it. In the same vain, it would be oh-so satisfying whenever the day finally came and I could work from home. Just rolling out of bed, and doing some work in a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. Blasting music to my heart’s content. Closing the lid on my laptop at the end of the day, going from work to play in an instant. Savoring every moment.
Nowadays I just have soup every day. And it’s so bland. And I’m never full. Maybe in the spring I can have something else.
