What Can We Do?

Millions of white-collar Americans are discovering that it is possible to accomplish everything required from home in a fraction of the time it took at the office.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that fraction is 5/8.

So many inefficiencies have been eliminated! Commuting alone represented a major investment in time and effort. It also caused stress, as in rushing to catch a train, eluding rush hour, or realizing halfway to work that once again, the damned cellphone charger is missing.

By comparison, the new commute is relatively uneventful.

There also used to be so many meetings. What, a distraction!

Come to think of it, lots of the interactions with co-workers were more social in nature than professional.

Now that our time is our own, no one cares whether we get dressed or not. Even if you are required to appear on a video chat, you can easily fake it. No one cares which restaurant you go to for lunch,  either, because you won't be going to lunch.

Today is Friday. TGIF. No one hears that.

There's lots of time to yourself, that is for sure. As the old saying goes, "two's company, three's a crowd."

Nobody ever said what one was.

The headlines suggest this state of being may last for the next two years, although commentators are putting a lot of effort into seeking the silver linings in all of this. Did you hear there might be a cure, or a vaccine soon? Like by next year, maybe.

***

Luckily, there is lots to do with your spare time. Yesterday, for example, I wrote about family histories. You might try doing that.

Researching family history is complex.  Starting with your mother and a father; each of whom presumably had parents, you already have six characters to develop and you've barely gotten started.

The reason my family knows about our theoretical connection to Shakespeare is because of a period sort of like this one -- over 30 years ago, when my oldest child was homeschooling. The difference is that that one was voluntary. She watched a PBS documentary that weighed the evidence that Edward deVere was possibly the actual author of the poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

At the same time she saw the documentary, my daughter was researching family history as part of her homeschooling routine. She read a document compiled by one of my distant Canadian relatives that contained the information that deVere was in fact our original family name, later anglicized to Weir, and that we were French.

She put two and two together and theorized that we were descended from the actual Shakespeare. She was around 11 at the time and also interested in Britsh royalty, which led her to other adventures, including an article she wrote with a friend that was published by a national magazine.

You could say she used her time outside of the formal education system rather well.

***

In the best of times, many of us have to struggle to explain exactly how we fit into the world.

And these are hardly the best of times.

For most people, work helps in the process of how we come to view ourselves. We have titles, we get performance evaluations, and from time to time we receive special recognition.

Over time, these occurrences assume some sort of pattern. We have been judged by the world to be this or that and there is a narrative that can be constructed to explain it all.

We don't necessarily have much control control over that narrative. Others write the story for us.

One time, many years ago, I got a glowing performance evaluation by a supervisor who misspelled the word "peer" as in "he is well-respected by his piers." He then told me my job was being eliminated, which meant, of course, I would have plenty of time to walk on piers as opposed to working with my peers.

I've not saved a single performance evaluation from my long career. As far as my life story is concerned, they never actually happened.

There's a scene in the great Australian director Peter Weir's film "Witness" where the boy character, Samuel Lapp, is showing his adult visitor, John Book (Harrison Ford) around his farm in Amish country. Samuel opens the door to an empty grain elevator.

"This place really echoes," he says.

Spending a lot of time alone can mean listening to our own echoes. The question is "What do we hear?"

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