I was actually cooking, not just throwing meals together. I was loving working from home, able to put a load of washing on the line in between interviews.

I was walking in my neighbourhood, meeting complete strangers who also happened to live in a suburb where I had resided for close to 20 years, making idle chit chat at the park while our dogs and children mucked about.

I was Zooming with university friends I hadn't seen for ages, Thursday night drinks, almost like we'd agreed to meet up in the Buttery at Bruce Hall, where we'd reminisce about those times and sometimes get serious about the times we lived in now.

I was doing crossword puzzles again, drinking cups of tea outside in the afternoon sun, reading books. I was happy.

Is anyone else feeling somewhat nostalgic about lockdown?

Thanks Facebook memories for reminding us about every post.

Is anyone wishing, in a perverse kind of way, we were there again? Told to stay at home, forced to think about what was essential, realising that a lot of things we thought were important, actually weren't.

And a whole host of things you'd taken for granted for so many years became the building blocks you built a life around.

Family, those few friends, dinner at the table, Sunday afternoons on the couch.

Time.

I think we had, and still have, it too good here in this wonderful country of ours. For as much as we grumbled about restrictions and shutdowns and lockouts and a lack of direction from leaders, we weren't dying by the thousands every day.

More than 3.3 million people have died of Covid worldwide; only, although only is the wrong word to use, 910 in Australia (three here in the ACT). India, where close to 4000 people are dying every day, where 23 million people have been diagnosed, where more than a quarter of a million people have died, puts it all into perspective.

It feels so wrong, so privileged, to be complaining about having to scan a QR-code, to check in at the gym, or a restaurant. It feels so, I don't know what the word is here, perhaps wrong is again the word, to be aching for a life where we were in the middle of the worst of it. Our worst was nothing really.

But I miss it.

I find myself regularly discussing, on a professional and personal level, what it is that the pandemic has taught us, or what, I hope, we have learned from it. For me it's about that reconnection with a simpler life. With less friends, and more connection. Less commitments, more choice.

A life where we addressed things with more respect for what it takes to, say, get a meal on a restaurant table (think farmers, wait staff, kitchen hands, owners, investors); or a song to our Spotify playlist where musicians could no longer sing out loud in front of an audience.

I pray, pray, that we no longer feel resentful towards our children's teachers, we all fumbled our way through those terms spent at our dining tables.

We all had to deal with remote learning, it wasn't pretty, and I got a bit stroppy, back then, admonishing parents who complained about the whole idea of homeschooling, saying you weren't actually homeschooling because you weren't setting curriculum and the like.

I'm sorry I was like that. I wasn't dealing with small children. But wasn't it nice to know what your children were learning, what books they were reading, who their teachers actually were, how interested, or disinterested, our children were in history and design and algebra, how our children made the choice that their school day would be better spent kicking goals at the local park, perhaps working on PDHPE and geometry at the same time, than it was turning the pages in a textbook. Or was that just me?

Look, I don't want this pandemic to continue. It's ridiculous to ask for a cure, perhaps a sensible management plan is all we can ask for. But I don't want us to forget about all the good things that came out of it.

READ MORE:

We've been herded back into the office, we're able to book tables and attend the footy. Queensland is even an option now.

How hard is it to get a weekend away somewhere warm? We've started to feel a little entitled again, entitled to travel, and eat, and be, in places outside our perimeter.

We've started to forget what is essential. The most overused word of the pandemic. Because it's not what we thought it was.

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