it's often the little things that matter

The latest seven-day lockdown for Auckland give us more time to evaluate and appraise. No restaurants, no bars, no coffee shops, no parties, no crowds, then add in a Tsunami, to be fair, it was a tough week. Sure, I know other places in the world have it a lot, lot tougher. I am not a nay-sayer; I agree and support the government’s stand, but you did get a strong feeling of here we go again.

I don’t want to take credit for this, (I heard it on the radio while driving) but a life coach was looking not at the silver lining of Covid, but of the effect. He said in his opinion, that Covid and the associated restrictions, ‘concentrated’ our life experiences. That the inability to do whatever we chose, reflected against what we could do. It has given us a chance to evaluate what is important and what’s not. What we need and what we don’t. The value in walking with the family on the beach compared with dinner in town. Mountain biking your local area compared to driving to the city. Even the loss of income, people are looking and openly saying ‘how much do I really need to live’. What’s the value and loss against earning less but getting more time.

Sure once the restriction are lifted, we will slowly go back to swilling ten-dollar extra soy double shot, no sugar, cinnamon lattes. But hopefully we can take forward some of the experiences we have chosen because of the restrictions forward to our unrestricted life and recall the value of a walk on the beach or the hand shake of a friend.

This issue is our survival issue and when talking to some of these people a common thread is that you ‘don’t know what got till it gone’. Brodie Selene comes to mind, he finished the Coast to Coast at 16, was tramping and surfing and involved in surf lifesaving and then overnight his world disappears. I read this heartfelt story and thought if it happened to me, I could say I had a good run. But Brodie was 16, he was just getting going on life and it was ripped away from him (you can read the rest). But he talks about missing all the stuff he could do and how much value it had.

Maybe looking to the future we can look and value that which we so easily take for granted.

I’ll leave you with a story from a friend who lives in the USA, he is older, 75, and lives in a part of LA where there is a high density of Covid cases. Last week he got the vaccine, this week he hugged his grandchildren for the first time in a year.

The little things are often the most valuable and maybe, just maybe, Covid has taught us not to take them for granted.