Obviously, the pandemic is a shitty situation all around – people are losing their jobs, businesses are shutting down, our entire world has been disrupted in ways large and small.
Still, I’m an optimist at heart and I can’t help but think of a few ways that I’m personally fortunate, even in the midst of a growing dystopia.
1. As Gen-Xers, Shea and I are in a good spot to get through this. Millennials have youth, Boomers have financial stability but Gen-Xers have a good mix of both – many of us are well-established in our careers but still young enough to not be the most at-risk demographic for this virus.
2. We’re very fortunate that this has hit when our kids are 12 (going on 13) and 6 (going on 7). Pace is old enough to babysit his sister and though most of his babysitting has been shorter stints of a few hours or a day at most, we are willing to try extended babysitting for him, especially now that school is out by the end of this week. (I also work five minutes from home so can run home in an emergency.)
3. Shea and I both have unionized, good-paying, relatively stable jobs. We each have lots of seniority and banked paid sick time if needed.
4. Our tropical vacation happened *just* as coronavirus was getting bad and we made it home safely. Lots of people we know either had to cancel trips or are scrambling to get back to Canada. In a similar vein, our house sold at the start of December. If it hadn’t sold by now, who knows how long we’d be sitting on it or how much of a hit we’d take to sell it?
5. Having lived in a few much larger places, we’re lucky to live in Regina (I have no idea how accurate it is but someone said there’s probably no better place to be during the pandemic than Saskatchewan – world-class healthcare, first world infrastructure for Internet and utilities, sparsely populated population, temperature extremes – though I’ve never found confirmation if virus is affected by temperature either.)
Again, this is a shitty situation that’s affecting many people in many ways – I know friends who have lost jobs already, people who are anxious about continuing to care for their elderly parents, people who aren’t elderly but still high risk due to other health issues, people who are stranded outside Canada. I’m very conscious of ways that life could be worse (and being married to a frontline healthcare worker isn’t great) but overall, I’m trying to maintain perspective and be positive.
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