Social Lock down

Social Lock down

The year is 2020, in the beginning of the year, anticipations of a fabulous year ahead was so positive. But then as news broke out that there is a possible Global Pandemic in January, most of us does not pay much attention to it. As most human beings have this, it will not happen to me attitude. As the virus called Covid-19, started to spread at an alarming rate globally, world’s leaders called for a major lockdown or a Restricted Movement Control (RMC) starting in March 2020. In Malaysia, our RMC started from 18^th March, expected to last till 28^th April.

What does this means? Everyone will need to stay at home, no social gatherings, dinning out are not permitted, non-essential businesses are ordered to close, schools closed and only limited movement within a certain radius are allowed to buy necessities. Violators were slapped with hefty fines, roadblocks and closure of certain roads were enforced.

With all these happenings, many thoughts arises:-

·         How to cope with daily life during this period

·         What businesses will draw the last breath or thrive

·         What is our social responsibilities

·         What will happen after this crisis

Let’s dive into coping with the daily life during this period, various people will have their own challenges, I am going to isolate it to my own frame work.

I am already in my late fifties, I switched career 7 years ago from a contractor and re-educated myself to become a Personal Trainer in health and fitness and an event manager as well. This complete changed of lifestyle and activities, landed me with an entirely different group of friends and clienteles, which needs to be socially and physically active in a positive manner.  

With this lockdown order, all activities stopped and everyone were so reliant on technology like, group chat, group meeting, virtual classes and social media. These open up a whole new outlook of how people going to carry out with their activities, especially the elderly or senior age group.

Despite having all these technological help, the social interaction is still a very crucial part of our life. As we trek along with the virtual meeting, I observed that most participants were quite reluctant to voice out and action are unable to communicate properly. This brings about a non-impactful meeting/training, but as the saying goes, something is better than nothing.

 And on the home front, there are a lot of adjustments needed to make,

• Stocking up on groceries, we in Kuala Lumpur are so fortunate, we have supermarkets within our doorsteps. In the past we just buy stuffs whenever it is running low, and does not have the habit of stocking up
• Eating out was the norm, now we are having home cooked meals every day, from these we can comprehend the plights of full time housewives, where they need to cook and plan for the meals every day.
• Putting up with your family members 24/7 can be challenging, as we are not use to spend so much time confine in the house, and as time goes along everyone just became quiet, and glued to the TV, mobiles and computer. As I hypothesized, some couples may ended up in divorce or grew deeper in love or just speechless.
• Catching up on back logs, finish the books that you always wanted to read, updated homework, tidying the house and updating the blogs.
• Missing your friends and social gatherings, outdoor activities, outdoor exercises and sports.

On the other hand, we learned

• ·         Groceries planning, do not buy unnecessary and food rationing
• ·         Be thrifty, careful on the spending, as some may lost some incomes during this period
• ·         Have empathy with your family members, non-demanding
• ·         Learn to live in isolation or limited mobility
• ·         Ways to fill your time
• ·         Learning up new knowledge

Let us pray that this pandemic be over soon, and once we come out of this event, our outlook of life will be different. Viruses do not discriminate, whether you are rich, poor, powerful, different races or powerless. These are invisible enemies where the whole world is fighting on different grounds. But then on the positive note, the earth have a chance to rest during this pandemic, pollution reducing, rivers run clearer and the forest is getting a rest.

There are still a lot of uncertainties after this event, why stress oneself on these uncertainties, just take it as it comes along.