The Transition Artist

Just before the confinement rules went into effect in France, I made the snap decision to live out confinement in the countryside. After only two days of staying at home in my apartment and a sinking realization as I ran at a very crowded park that my only nearby green space would soon be closed, I wanted out. 

In early March, I traded my apartment in Paris for a little house just a few kilometers from the beach in Normandy.

My boyfriend and I got in touch with the owners of the house and arranged to show up just before the ban on travel would set in for France. We packed our bags in 30 minutes, throwing enough clothes and snacks into a suitcase for two weeks. Knowing I’d have a backyard and nearby country roads to run on, I tossed my running shoes, my workout mat, and my weights into the car and off we went. 

Two-weeks quickly turned into a month, and then two, as confinement was renewed. As the days began to fly by and blur together, slowly but surely everything started to change; my daily routine, my priorities, my thinking. 

My “new normal” started to look like time passing too quickly. 

One month was enough to push me out of years of routine and shift my definition of productive. In that short time, I got accustomed to filling out a paper to justify my presence outdoors before leaving home, going to bed after midnight and waking up around 9, and staying put. 

Where once I could hardly sleep past 7:30am on the weekend thanks to a body clock that had me opening my eyes at 6:30am on weekdays, now, try as I might to wake up earlier, 8:30 feels like a struggle. I stopped fighting it and now the alarm rings at 9am and it feels like 6am, though I know it’s not. I lie in bed for 20-30 minutes wasting time, not wanting to leave my warm cocoon, piddling around on social media, waffling between a strong urge to cuddle and an itch to start my day. Feeling torn between the two is a luxury I never had when I had to be at work by 10am. 

Back in Paris, in a world that feels like some sort of distant memory, I should be in the train. I should be recovering my breath after sprinting for a train that never seems to come when the app says it will, hair still wet from a post-run shower, sandwiched between a few smelly people in too-hot winter coats, trying to meditate standing up with the noise canceling feature of my headphones on and the volume up at a comfortably loud hum.

These days, if I’m feeling brave, I manage to coax myself out of bed to eek out a quick circuit or interval run between 9 and 9:45, with just enough time to shower and hop to my computer by 10. The first few weeks of quarantine, I had daily 10am calls with my France team to start my day – calls I barely made it to on time despite my not having to commute anymore; calls I’d attend with a bowl of cereal or peanut butter toast hidden next to the computer, or, once or twice, with sweat still dripping down my face and my breathing just slowed enough to pass as normal (no, I didn’t turn on the video for those).

Those calls have ended now, since I’m now 50% unemployed. My days start later and later. Our team’s hours have been reduced to part-time work weeks and I only work afternoons or 2.5 days.

Somehow the days still fly by. I don’t see the time go. I sit down with my laptop in front of the window or at a table outside on nice days and time floats away. I pay more attention to my calendar alerts for upcoming meetings than the hour on the clock and work until I have lunch around 3pm. 

As I work, I look up every now and then to watch the owners of the house I’m staying in hustle back and forth across their lawn. They cut the grass, pull weeds, plant their vegetable garden, and feed the chickens. They hang sheets to dry on the line outside and tend to their garden. Their activities calm and mesmerize me. We work almost side by side, humming along at our tasks, though theirs seem to be to a different tune. They plow the field behind the yard, stopping now and then to chat with the neighbors on either side of the fence or check the blisters on their hands. Around 4pm, when I hop on my fifth consecutive call of the day with someone thousands of miles away in the US or the UK, they crack open beers, lounging in the sunshine as they take a break from their hard work, and the geese run by. Though we share the same space, we inhabit it differently. 

I find it hard to turn off at 6pm. My to-do list stares at me from the yellow virtual sticky note on my computer. All the unchecked boxes and follow-ups glare at me, wondering when I’ll get to them. I can’t help but stare back at the seemingly endless yellow trail and want to slash a few items off. The idea of productivity keeps me going, makes me feel more whole, stronger, and useful. I send a few more emails, do a bit more research, uncover a few more pieces of information and schedule a few more follow-up calls.

I feel a strange sense of satisfaction. I’ve fabricated a world in which doing something, even a very small thing that may not pay-off anytime soon, in place of nothing (or endless scrolling) feels like a sort of victory. So, I continue doing, whittling away at a list of tasks until I realize my eyes are tired. It’s 8pm and my whole day has been a series of virtual checked boxes. I flip the screen closed – not fully shutting my computer – or my brain – down, but hibernating, in case something else comes up. 

(Yes, I know I should shut down, but if you think that’s bad you should see the edition of windows and iOS I’m running, my computer hasn’t seen an update in so long it’s probably riddled with viruses… I digress…)

At 8:30pm, I need my brain to quit whirring. I want to stop thinking about work. I want to turn it off, but maybe also to talk about it and wonder aloud about the curious things I’ve been looking at on my screen all day. I need release; I don’t want to sit alone with it all anymore, sedentary, marinating, feeling more exhausted the longer my brain hangs onto it. Maybe in another world, I would’ve left my laptop at the office today. I might’ve meditated on my way home, listened to a podcast, or read a few chapters of my current book. Maybe, but that was another time, a different chapter, when going to work required an hour-long commute both ways.

I don’t miss it. I think back to the packed train, the 2-hour, daunting, miserably packed commutes during the strikes in Paris earlier this year. I remember waking up at 6am, heart racing, already sweating, thinking about what time the first train would come, how I’d manage to catch it, whether I’d have enough room in the overly-cramped wagon to squeeze in my gym bag. I shudder just thinking about it. No, I don’t miss it. I’d rather be here, now, marinating.

I’ve gotten into the habit of going for walks with my boyfriend in the evening to switch out of work mode. Off we go before the sun sets at 9pm, my boyfriend turned roommate turned coworker turned therapist turned lover turned friend, and me. We walk the same route through a wide, open stretch of farmland every evening, even when one of the coastal winds blows in and it’s gusting so hard it stings my face and makes my hands cold through the pockets of my jacket. We walk away from our individual, all-consuming to-do lists and back into our easy companionship. We debrief our days and let our minds find each other again.  

We exchange few words when we’re focused on our respective task lists during the day, so we suddenly have lots to say. I tell him about curious things I read or heard, share something I learned from an interesting article, or vent. He tells me about an interview, a new Olympic initiative, and the way live sports are changing. It’s as though we weren’t sitting 5 feet from one another all day, sharing the same tiny house, looking at the same beige walls or out the same sunny window. We catch up as if he weren’t the neighbor in the coworking space who asked if we could trade seats so he could have some time in the sun. We recap as if we weren’t privy to every second of each other’s every day. And it’s nice. It makes me grateful for my noise cancelling headphones and my personal computer. It feels normal, like nothing’s changed though everything has.

We eat around 9:30 or 10pm most nights. I joke that we’ve become Spanish in confinement. It seems late, but if I didn’t look at the clock, it wouldn’t feel out of the ordinary.

We eat whatever we feel like. I went from vegetable-based dinners to meat and cream-based dinners and broke out for the first few weeks as my body adjusted. There’ve been cheeses – soooo many cheeses, meats (we hardly ever eat meat in a normal week), and desserts galore. We have more snacks than I know what to do with. I get the urge to nibble on pretzels, peanuts, Belvita cookies and only very rarely fruits all day long. I’m never really hungry around dinner time. I’ve grazed for so long and eaten so well at other meals, I don’t feel hunger so much as a desire to do something, to consume.

Consumption was the theme of my first month in quarantine. 

I consume so much more these days. I consume more than I can possibly digest. I eat, I watch, I scroll, I listen.

At first, I worried about feeling isolated, but I’ve found I don’t feel lonely at all – we’ve got FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, Teams, Messenger, and every other application under the sun to solve that. I worried about getting sick or having friends in crisis. I worried about feeling disconnected. I worried about leaving people behind. 

I had given up Instagram and Facebook for lent but re-downloaded both so I could feel more connected. It made me feel very full and served its purpose – I’ve spoken to friends I haven’t seen in ages, checked in on loved ones and even acquaintances, but also just been distracted. I graze on other people’s thoughts, opinions, feelings, days, meals, and then a sprinkling of my own day in and day out. I’ve consumed so much I’m often left sitting in an information coma hefty enough to match my food coma.

I thought being in quarantine would be a very self-reflective period. I’d paint again, maybe think about starting another business. I wanted to write about it. Surely, I thought, with this much time on my hands, I’ll pick up writing again. With so much time at home to think, I’ll have lots to say, so much to get out. 

The first month of quarantine, no words came. My writing remained dead silent. 

I wrote a total of seven words into a journal entry, “well, folks, we’re almost a week in.” That’s all. Instead of being filled with free time and ideas, my first month of quarantine felt busy, as busy if not busier than before, without the hassle of commuting.

Staying put and watching the days pass at light speed leaves me with a tangled web of conflicting emotions. It feels like a reel of unending contrasts and tensions; a bit like going for an interval run against the coastal winds, running full tilt into heavy gusts of air, against wind so powerful that instead of feeling like I’m taking in more oxygen, I feel like I can hardly breathe. It feels like spending my free time exercising long and hard because I suddenly can (and need to burn off all those extra calories), but not leaving time to write or paint or think on starting a business. It feels like an endless need to prove something, though I’m not sure to whom. It feels like sharing pictures of my backyard and feeling slightly guilty that those without a backyard might not like to see them. It feels like the perfect picture of happiness; long, productive work days with sunshine, flowers, animals, and green, green grass outside my window, and, yet, something missing.

Where has all the time gone?

As I near the close of a second month in quarantine, the dust has settled on the initial shock of social separation. It seems we’ve now collectively nestled into new routines. I’m beginning to loosen my tight grip on connectivity and shift my attention back into the present. As if by magic, I’m beginning to hear my own voice in my head again. Slowly but surely, my words are finding their way out.

Writing for me is an exercise in getting to know myself. As someone who tends towards extroversion, it represents a uniquely introspective opportunity for me to share and process with myself. For me, writing requires space from other activities, quiet, and time alone. In my first month of confinement, bizarre as it is, I hardly had any of those things. 

It is welcome relief to hear the hum of my thoughts again. For four weeks, it seemed like I was stuck listening to the soundtrack of someone else’s mind. I saturated myself with other people’s thoughts and opinions to the point that it seemed insensitive to write about my own experience. I paid such close attention to other people’s “new normal” that I wasn’t tuning into my own.

As a result, I found myself strangely grateful when a second month of quarantine was announced, if only to do it over again. It felt like a second chance to try again and come out feeling more fulfilled, more in tune with myself. This month, I’ve been spending a little more time doing things that bring me joy. I linger in bed with a book instead of on social media. I sit in the sun writing journal entries to myself that I may or may not publish. I hop out of bed a little earlier to exercise. I try not to check my work emails on the weekends, and I’m relishing the extra time I have.   

I may not get this right, but I hope to make the most of my days in the countryside, in the hope that they’ll pass just a little slower and bring me a little closer to myself.