I am back! After two (lonely) weeks of working from my studio in Geneva followed by six (cozy) weeks of working from my partner’s apartment in Groningen, my heart is overflowing with joy because I could resume my work on University premises this week. I feel blessed that I can see my colleagues in person and that I can do some experiments again. Naturally, I know that COVID-19 continues to ravage our society and that neither my feelings of happiness nor any personal distress I might be experiencing right now is relevant in times of a global crisis. Here, I only want to briefly mention that I am trying to enjoy all the small things and that I am practicing self-reflection a lot which is really helpful for me at the moment.
Self-reflection?
Indeed, I am performing the type of mental gymnastics which I needed to do again and again during my Pharmacy studies and which was not (at all) popular among us students.
Would it not make sense to await the end of the crisis thus allowing for making more comprehensive and thorough assessments?
Well, awaiting the end of the crisis would give the opportunity to oversee a longer period of time, to take multiple events and insights into account, and to study patterns in behavior and adaptation. Corresponding assessments will definitely be more comprehensive than those performed at an earlier stage. Waiting, however, goes hand in hand with an increased risk of forgetting some important factors, and I thereby believe that self-reflection can turn out to be much more thorough when performed earlier. Moreover, this early practice will lead to the drawing of many intermediate conclusions which eventually can be used to draw one final conclusion once the entire situation can be overseen, for example when the crisis ends. Such conclusion can thereby be both comprehensive and thorough, yet it does require some flexibility in our thinking, beliefs, adaptations, and actions in the period of drawing intermediate conclusions.
Just to give an example, working from home was really working out well for me seven weeks ago. I even said three weeks later that I had never been so productive in my working life, and I meant it. However, if you would have asked me about my experiences with working from home one week ago, my reply would have been less enthusiastic. I almost completely ran out of self-motivation, and allowing myself to do some sports during the day could not even help me with boosting my productivity. The situation was so bad that I could only write two paragraphs for the introduction section of the manuscript that I am currently working on during the final five working days in the Netherlands. In comparison, I only needed three hours last Monday to write the last three paragraphs of this introduction by which I concluded the manuscript that I subsequently shared with my supervisor.
So:
-Intermediate conclusion 1 (after one week of confinement): working from home can work well for me.
-Intermediate conclusion 2 (after three weeks of confinement): working from home can work really well for me.
-Intermediate conclusion 3 (after five weeks of confinement): I need occasional discussions with colleagues, for example at the coffee machine, to stay sharp and motivated.
-Intermediate conclusion 4 (after six weeks of confinement): I need to buy a new bike.
-Intermediate conclusion 5 (after seven weeks of confinement): working from home starts to become a nightmare.
-Intermediate conclusion 6 (after eight weeks of confinement): a new bike does not make me work more productively.
-Intermediate conclusion 7 (one week after resuming my work on the campus): working from home works really well for me, particularly in times of writing and/or data processing, yet a good balance between on-site and off-site working needs to be found.
-… [who knows what my next conclusion will be?]
At last, a growing list of intermediate conclusions may be beneficial from the perspective of personal growth; still, I would prefer to draw my final conclusions today rather than tomorrow since this would mean that COVID-19 lost its war against humanity. And even though I currently like enjoying all the small things in life, I also want to enjoy the big things again, like hugging my mother which probably represents the biggest thing I could wish for right now.
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