A New Rhythm

Hey, I thought to myself as I got out of bed for the early morning meetings I am chairing much of the week, I think I am getting the hang of this working from home thing.  I am getting accustomed to the through-the-looking-glass sense of work where things are backwards.  For instance, email becomes an easier and less formal way to communicate whereas face to face contact requires a bit more structure than just dropping by someone’s desk - the opposite of what happens when we are all together. 

And even though I am not a morning person and these meetings I am responsible for start early (and the earliest is tomorrow – 5:30 AM – although that is probably just a regular time for those of you with small children), I was feeling on a roll:  the international meetings have been very interesting (I will give a couple of highlights at Town Hall), Canadians are giving us donations for our covid work, and the Prime Minister made some good announcements supporting our sector yesterday.  

So I was feeling that this new reality was going along very well – and then during our Executive meeting this afternoon Dave (Spedding) mentioned an issue he and I had discussed.  I thought “did we talk about that last Thursday or the beginning of last week”, and then I recalled it was just yesterday afternoon.  An awful lot of information and work seems to have flown by since then.  Maybe I still have some adjusting to do. 

And I don’t have school-age kids.  I thought about those of you who are parents when Ontario government has announced schools closed for another month (if BC, Quebec and Alberta haven’t yet done so I am sure it will happen soon).  I can only imagine how hard it would have been when my sons were in school. And I must applaud all the parents out there finding ways to make it work.