Developing work-arounds during a pandemic, and afterwards
With over a month in lockdown due to the pandemic, people have developed a number of creative work-arounds to still get their needs met. Here's stories to help you imagine new ways to get old things done.
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Peter and Barbara use Zoom to have the weekly get-togethers with family that they used to have in-person. Martha watches church online from her kitchen table. A colleague attends AA support groups online. Jim takes his kids on a bike ride on the greenway, when he would have previously been commuting home from work, giving his wife the quiet time she needs to do hers. Aranzazu gives her college age kids the first haircuts she has since they were little. Carol calls me when she needs groceries. Glenda has moved all the classes she used to teach in-person online. I go on long walks, while social distancing, with the women I used to meet before work at the Y.
People are becoming creative to meet longstanding needs in new ways.
In a talk I give on aging called "How to live to the edge of the frame, even as the frame narrows," I highlight the inspiring ways I see people in their seventies, eighties, nineties and even at one-hundred, coming up with solutions to the constraints that can come with age. To read more about each individual below, click on the link.
- Jerry Kroll, 86, wanted to help abandoned dogs at the SPCA, but couldn't do the more physical labor of walking and cleaning cages. Instead, he sits out front in a rocking chair with those dogs who have gone unadopted for the longest time.
- Aimee Everett, 95, who is legally blind, uses a variety of tools, like the magnifier she is holding, and techniques in order to continue living a full life.
- Jane Bridgers, 77, who lost the use of her fine motor skills after a stroke, became a sculptor while also continuing to regain function after Medicare deemed physical therapy was not longer warranted.
- Bernie Kemp, 92, a former economist, whose macular degeneration was making writing hard to do, bought a larger screen, learned how to dictate and then have the text read back to him, as well as magnify it duirng the editing process.
These stories are not so different from those of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Menlo Park or Research Triangle. Necessity is the mother of invention.
And while the necessary restrictions put in place to slow the spreading of COVID-19 may slowly be lifted, things will never go back exactly to how we were living beforehand. Some of these work-arounds will become the new normal.
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