It’s a year we didn’t see coming.
I mean. We knew that 2020 was coming. But if you asked me 10 years ago what 2020 would be like, it would have seemed like a modern, cool era with self-driving cars and holodecks.
Instead, 2020 came in like a beast and hasn’t really stopped tearing things up. It’s been a year of 100 years—so long that it is hard to remember that it started with fires across Australia before it dropped a global pandemic on us. A pandemic that I’d heard on podcasts was likely, but with SARS and H1N1 coming in and fading away, it felt like our modern era was safe from such horrors.
When we started the year, we picked the word “balance” as our theme. It seemed like a good word to sum up our collective goals and plans. Balance, we thought, meant a balance of personal and professional, a give-and-take support system to help each other through a crunch. We believed that developing our balance and core strengths would make us stronger and better at what we do personally and professionally.
We felt good. We felt centred as we were coming off a good year of growth and work for our team. Scriptorium was going to conquer 2020.
In our blog, we included a line that said: “Balance makes us think about a strong stance that lets us travel over the rocky paths in front of us as easily as the smooth ones.”
Fast forward to May. Six weeks into the first lockdown when we were all struggling with maintaining work while the world tipped upside down. How do you maintain balance when the path ahead is dark and you are tripping over all the rocks piling up?
Balance certainly didn’t make traversing the reality of a global pandemic “as easily as the smooth” paths. But it did help us manage the challenges of this past year.
This year has been hard for so many of us. We have not escaped unscarred and saddened by the loss that we’ve experienced on a global level and on personal levels. When you think how “normal” it has become to wait for the daily rising death toll and worry about numbers of people getting sick, all while trying to support local businesses and non-profits and to socially distance from people we care about. 2020 is breaking our hearts.
We’ve still talked about “balance” as the right word for 2020, but its meaning had fundamentally shifted. As they say: hindsight is 2020. Balance has helped us cope by:
doing our best to prevent the spread of COVID, while finding different ways to connect with people
realizing that our schedules might not look the same right now
deciding what really is a priority and what could be put aside for now
embracing the online meetings and new technology to still deliver good service to our clients
maintaining daily contact with our team even though we haven’t been together in person for 10 months
creating good boundaries around work and family life because it exists in the same place and time
This year didn’t play out how we had expected it to. We were fortunate that while many things changed, our work was a constant because we were already set up to work from home.
We are so grateful that we’ve been able to keep working in large part thanks to clients who have had ongoing work for us.
Balance is part of how we survived this year, but not in the way we planned. So let’s put on our editing hats to make a few changes to our original blog on balance:
Balance makes us think about a strong stance that helps us travel over the rocky paths in front of us.
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