Home Alone Together, Week Five: So Many Opportunities for Creativity

I’ve just placed a pan of granola in the oven. I’d discovered a stale box of Grape-Nuts in the pantry and for some reason, have been trying to be super frugal and not waste any food.

Getting more groceries is a tad challenging, as I imagine many others know too well. And flour requires taking your life in your hands since the places that will ship me canned beans and pasta and even dish soap all day long will not ship me a bag of flour.

I had the wild idea of grinding the cereal into a flour, but settled instead for using it in a granola. Heating it up in the oven should disguise its staleness, right?  (Yes, it was a very yummy addition.)

And thus we make our current situation into an opportunity for creativity. There are opportunities for creativity all over the place, they sure aren’t hard to find.

Another opportunity for creativity is awaiting me at the sewing machine – a mask. I had to go to my workplace the other day and the organization where I work now requires masks in the type of building where my workplace is located.

My coworkers kindly all offered me one of the masks they’d ordered whenever they arrive, but that didn’t help me in that moment. Never mind that they are all at their houses while I am at mine.

Having seen Colin Hanks’ post on making your own mask out of a kerchief, I located the only one of my kerchiefs I could find and folded it into the mask.

Too bad it was a brightly colored red and orange thing. Well, at least everyone would know I was doing my best to keep everyone safe.

Strangely, but oh so thankfully, I am generally happy – no worse than before social distancing. Less pressured to get out or do tasks to prove my worth to unseen “they.”

No longer compelled by friendly inquiries asking what I did over the weekend, long stretches of reading or writing or walking or simply staring at the sky or grass behind my apartment are all acceptable past-times now.

Instead of sensing a slight pity that I don’t fill my free time with family and social obligations, I now sense a slightly yearning wonder at my calm, peaceful days.

Taking time to day-dream is finally acknowledged for the mental health self-care activity it has always been, not the leanings of a lazy or selfish life.

Perhaps that’s why the article by Dr. Jonice Webb titled 7 Reasons Some People Actually Feel Better and Happier During the Pandemic caught my eye. Webb points out what I’d already discovered. There are people in the current situation who feel more grounded, focused, and valid than they ever have before. Also less alone, lost, and insecure.

What’s wrong with them, Webb says one may ask. Her answer? “Most of the folks who are feeling better right now are genuinely caring people who, if anything, tend to over-focus on other people’s needs at the expense of their own.”

Now that makes total sense. Webb goes on to explain a little more about who these people are. For example, “those whose specific childhood challenges prepared them” by requiring them to act beyond their years.

As I’ve told more than one person, it’s like I can finally hear myself. The cacophony of the world out there remains out there. Beyond the screen, the phone, the video. I can communicate in writing, my favorite communication channel. When I converse with others, there are more barriers between their feelings and energy and my own. I’m no longer surrounded by people all day, everyday.

I’ve read people bemoaning that working in your home is hard because you can never escape work. I’d expected to feel the same way. But instead, I feel that I can more easily escape it now than before.

Now, with one step – okay, maybe three – I can be on my screened patio, looking at the sky and breathing fresh air.

In my office where I work, I have to take about 20 steps to a door, go downstairs, go through another door, and then for privacy, walk halfway across a parking lot before I am “away” for a break, but even there people can look out of windows to see me or walk out to get me.

Here, aint’ no one gonna be walkin’ after me. They are all in the same place I left them on top of my desk, waiting in messaging app bubbles, chat fields, and email in-boxes.

I’m not saying I don’t have anxieties and worries. Uncertainty is not a place I enjoy, whether at the top of an actual roller coaster or within the middle of a global emergency. And there are certain things I’d counted on doing – like reviewing food at Disney World – that are impossible at the moment.

But all the skills and tricks I’ve learned for “hyper-focus in ambiguous situations” (Dr. Webb again) and entertaining myself or making the best of limited resources are coming to the fore.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to be creative in challenging situations. I’m thankful that creativity is inherent in us all.