This is hard.
It’s difficult to put into words how to feel during a lockdown, this being the 3rd time in a year. Hard, not only to just express how you’re taking this all in but also without feeling a sense that on one side, there are other people suffering and I should be grateful for where I am, but sad you can’t meet and do more to help. That said, you can only do what you can do with the current restrictions.
“Control the controllables” I often read through various stoic teaching (Ryan Holiday is an excellent guide on this)
When trying to make sense of putting targets or aims or even simple ideas in place at the moment, it is ok just to drill things down to taking it week by week, day by day.
Being open, I’ve struggled to an extent with how fragile a set routine can be, ones that have been carefully built up over time that work into a lifestyle – ripped away – to then eventually building it back up – to fleetingly see it & feel it, but for it to change and be disrupted again is…exhausting.
However…
This is how I’m currently putting things in place to see things through…
One task at a time.
I’ve previously used a method created by Hal Elrod called SAVERS (Silence, Affirmations, Visualisations, Exercise, Reading, Scribing).
Sounds like a lot at first I know, but it has helped me very recently and why I have put this blog piece together. Using the 6 SAVERS, Hal wrote about putting these into practice using just a minute of each and building up from there.
It’s what I have used out of this 3rd lockdown, building one each day and it’s helping. This has been an overwhelming time – particularly with no end date, how to plan anything, to react, to feel – I’ve struggled with certain elements but using the SAVERS again as a platform has helped – starting with a foundation again of 6 minutes and doing what can be done within that & building it up – be that smaller breaks, at different times of the day, I started again from those 6 minutes.
I’ve not tried to reinvent the wheel with my routine but just looking at what I can control at this very moment.
And we can build and go from there.