In the meantime…

Sometimes, or perhaps more often than we’d like, things don’t go as planned. It can be due to injury, illness or other unforeseen circumstances. So what do we do, do we put life on hold and fill time with pointless activities? When it’s framed like this question our reaction is, of course not, but if we’re honest with ourselves isn’t that exactly what we do?

The COVID pandemic was a pivotal moment for me. Suddenly, we found ourselves with an abundance of time and nowhere to go. Like many, I began to fill my time on mindless activities like watching television, eating and scrolling endlessly on the internet or social media. Then, seemingly out of nowhere something in my mind shifted. I thought to myself, we all have things we have been putting off for one reason or another so why not seize the moment and begin doing instead of waiting.

This newfound energy and excitement sparked a period where my productivity soared. I secretly hoped the extra time we’d been given during the pandemic would never end, but of course, it did. Without this extra time, I found myself slowly slipping back into my old habits. This event in history was of course extremely rare. Once again, I wondered, what if I applied the same mindset I had during the pandemic on a smaller, everyday scale?

This takes me back to things like injury or illness. These things are definitely debilitating in one capacity, but they often free up time in other areas. So here’s where the scaled down version of the idea I applied during the pandemic came into play. What if, instead of doing nothing while waiting for an injury to heal or an illness to run its course, we chose to create?

Creation can mean a million different things from one person to the next. It can mean writing, cooking, drawing, gardening… the list goes on and on. The “what” isn’t as important as the “doing”. There are always productive alternatives we can fill our free time with even without an unforeseen event. So, what will you fill your time with in the meantime?

By René Boecking | explorewithrene.com