The Written Podcast: Resetting the Clock

As I’m writing this, I have less than one day to go before officially returning to work. When this post comes out, I’d have been back to work for an entire week. After 12 weeks of being lockdown and being furloughed, it is certainly giving off the impression of starting afresh, or resetting the clock back to 0, if you will.

I remember at the beginning of the year, keeping track of the virus as it spread throughout the world, watching countries go into lockdown one by one, thinking that we’re next. For a couple of months of the year, the entire world had come to a standstill; England had come to a standstill, save for all the heroic NHS staff and every single individual essential worker who made sure it kept ticking over at a steady pace until England was ready to gradually reopen.

The first couple of weeks of being furloughed was certainly a new experience for everyone, but for me personally, I might have been off work, but it certainly didn’t feel like a holiday. The first full week of lockdown, I remember firmly believing that I had slept in and would be late for work, only to realise straight after that I’m legally disallowed from stepping in through those doors.

I wrote a post whilst during lockdown about keeping my mind active by posting a few images of Premiere Pro and the sequences I made as I gradually developed my editing skills. That’s not all I did, though. I finished editing 1 book, whilst publishing another and wrote 2 short stories. I also watched an incredible amount of TV and used up a fair few hours playing games that I’m quite sure I now have literal square eyes. I also made sure I went outside for some fresh air by taking my dog, Jerry, for a decent walk around the area. Whilst Jerry will miss all the extra attention he’s been getting during this lockdown when I return to work, I don’t think he’ll miss all the exercise he had, but he needed all of that to compensate all the extra treats he was getting simply for being a good dog. In fact, as I’m writing this, he’s curled up by my feet asleep after a good long morning walk.

This is where I stopped writing this article as I didn’t know what to write. Whatever I had in my head sounded too poignant for this article, and I didn’t want to sound too philosophical or say what has already been said about the lockdown. I had intended to write this article in one go, but once I had gotten to the end of the paragraph above, I realised there wasn’t anything else I could say. This paragraph is being written on a Thursday night after four days being back at work.

On Monday, I didn’t know what to expect. Some things had changed, but the actual job itself remains the same. The first couple of hours certainly felt as if I was playing catch up even though there wasn’t anything for me to catch up to. When the phones began to ring, they never stopped, when customers began appearing at the counter they never stopped, and when every other element comes into play, the day resumes to what it was before the furlough period. It did not take long before it got back to how it was before lockdown began, but it never really felt like I hadn’t taken 12 weeks off, simply because I knew I had and therefore knew I had taken the opportunity to relax when I could.

Before the lockdown began, I was stressed. I was constantly feeling tired and knew my performance at work was greatly affected, but I kept powering on. Whilst I’ve mentioned that being furloughed didn’t feel like a holiday, I was still able to do acknowledge that I did not have to go to work, and therefore could sit back and relax.

I didn’t just reset the clock in terms of going back to work after a long weekend, I reset the clock in terms of having never worked there before and yet gifted with all the necessary knowledge to do the job. I walked into my work on Monday with the unexpected mentality of, this is a brand new job, and yet I know all that I need to do to do a good job. My performance has greatly improved, I have noticed.

Being furloughed was an unique experience, and during those times when that word had been used more times in the last three months than it ever had been in the last five years (I had not done any research to support that claim, just wanted to state how I had heard that word every day on the news), I let myself relax. I couldn’t go outside (except of course it was absolutely necessary), I couldn’t go to work, and I couldn’t not do nothing. Going back a couple of years when I was looking for a job, I put in a decent amount of effort into finding a job I equally knew I could do and enjoyed, but it was tough. I spent a year and a half since leaving college and finding my first job looking hard, but not being remotely successful. If I had sat around and watched TV all day, films, played games, I would have been told I had wasted my time. During the last three months in furlough, whilst I did keep myself occupied with various things I wanted to do, I did spend a good chunk of it watching TV and films, and I never once felt guilty of doing that. I watched two films back to back one day and did not once feel like I had wasted my time, because simply, the world had come to a standstill so I could.

Being able to sit back and not have to worry about wasting my time helped me reset my clock back to 0, allowing me to be the freshest I’ve been in a very long while.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)