Over the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about bubbles because at the moment it feels like I’m living in bubbles. Pockets of self-contained space floating around each other. Some days, like at the moment, my whole day is a bubble shared with my husband. Other days I float into a second space of the Foodbank and the staff and volunteers.
Then there are the 3rd spaces where I float between the two, my drive home. On Thursday I needed to get some food and for the first time in over a week drove to the supermarket. It was quite a shock to experience a different space. Empty carparks, deserted roads, shuttered shops. It made me think about bubbles of space and how some of us are moving between them and others are limited to a single bubble of home and how, for those of us who need to, we the transition between work and home.
The last week, as a Trustee of the Foodbank, it was pretty full on as we work out how to redesign our model of working and put everything in place to ensure that everyone in our community still receives food. So much learning, on the spot problem solving and decision making. From how to keep staff, volunteers and delivery people safe to the design of cardboard boxes to pack food into and the procurement of food.
A few days ago I came home feeling frazzled and a little overwhelmed and the first thing my husband wanted to share were the football jokes that had been bouncing back and forth between him and the rest of the family. In my head I’m going like, ‘What! Do you have any idea what my day has been like?’ He had been home alone all day, in fact all week, living in a very different bubble of lockdown.
All over the country thousands of us will be making these transitions from incredibly intense environments back into a family in lockdown. It reminded me of a TED talk I flagged up in a post I wrote a while back on Making the transition from work to home.
It was obviously written in a very different time but I have included the TED talk below. The start of it may feel a little irrelevant at the moment but stick with it because it will provoke you to think about how you make the transition between intense work environments to a home in lockdown. What do you need to do in the bubble of your 3rd space to make the transition back into family life. So if you have 17 minutes, make yourself a drink, sit down and have a listen.