It Is What It Is: Universal And Everlasting Lessons From Lockdown

By Marie-Claire Donnelly

2020 was the year nobody expected. As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the globe, the UK, like most countries, was put into lockdown. This went on for months, with people unable to go to work or socialise outside of their immediate family. Everyone was encouraged to 'stay home and stay safe.' 

Rather than despair over

• Language: English
• Publisher: That Guys House
• Release date: Mar 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913479800

Book preview

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Lesson 1 – Accepting and Embracing Change

Be not afraid,

I go before you always.

Come, follow me and I will give you rest.

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Journal Entry - Early Lockdown

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Dear God,

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Today has been very weird!

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Joanna has just dropped off some fitness equipment for me to use whilst taking part in home workouts and has collected a book that I had bought for my niece Faith. It was a very strange experience.

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It was strange due to the fact that she wasn’t able to come into my home, give me a cuddle, grab a coffee, and have a chat like she normally would. By chat, I mean the two of us would generally sit at my breakfast bar on our respective phones mindlessly scrolling, only half-listening to each other.

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I am quickly starting to realise that all the things that I used to take for granted and maybe became a bit complacent about are going to be really hard to live without anymore. I am praying that the restrictions won’t be for long. I am hopeful for a couple of weeks, three at most.

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Instead of coming into my house for said coffee and social media scrolling, Joanna had to drop the fitness equipment and collect Faith’s book from my front door as we aren’t ‘allowed’ to be less than 2m near each other.

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It’s called ‘Social Distancing’ – a term that no one had ever heard of until a few weeks ago. It’s a new rule that the government has enforced as a result of the Coronavirus or Covid-19 – a new virus which is spreading like wildfire around the world, killing thousands of vulnerable people. The powers that be, the scientists and the doctors do not understand it, cannot control it, and do not know how to make it go away. I am hoping that you do? Please tell me you do? You do, don’t you?

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To help me (and to save the kids from having a psycho-bitch mum) I have set some intentions for myself for this period of ‘new normal’.

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I am going to commit to my daily morning routine of meditating, praying, expressing gratitude, journaling, setting intention, and exercise. I believe that this will set me up for a great day and will help me to navigate this period as the best possible version of me.

I am going to refresh the mindfulness training I completed a few years ago and practice being more in the moment with my kids.

I am going to get out of my own way, dance with my inner critic, and do my bloody best to powerfully serve my amazing clients by being the very best yoga teacher and fitness instructor that I can be. I will repeat the mantra, ‘This is not about me. This is not about me,’ and learn to love, accept, and appreciate myself just the way I am – with zero justification required.

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Please help me.

All my love always,

MC xxx

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For the past couple of weeks, I have felt like I am in some science fiction movie or something that you imagine happening in the future. The quote ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’ keeps popping into mind.

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I remember discussing as a child what we thought the world would be like in 2020. My classmates and I thought that we would all be flying about in spaceships with robots on hand attending to our every whim. We are not. We are being told to stay at home, avoid contact with our nearest and dearest, and try to avoid catching and spreading this deadly virus.

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One movie which I have watched that had a massive impact on me for days and weeks afterwards was a film starring Will Smith called I Am Legend. The storyline is about a deadly man-made virus that spreads from person to person through physical contact.

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When infected, the previously very nice person turned into a zombie-like psychopath whose sole purpose was to kill or infect as many other people as possible. The long and short of the movie was, from what I can recall, that the virus was created by a scientist who believed that she had created a vaccine for cancer. Millions of people took the vaccine and rather than it stopping them from getting cancer, it turned them into these zombie-like psychopaths instead. After watching that movie, I remember spending sleepless nights worrying about it, thinking how easily this could happen.

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A contributory factor to this thinking of mine could have been due to the fact that I had just finished a course of medication to help me quit smoking. At the time, the medication I was taking was a relatively new drug, and the results were phenomenal: you literally just stopped smoking within two weeks of taking the drug, irrespective of how addicted you were to cigarettes. The side effects of taking it were, however, potentially pretty horrific – from really graphic nightmares to suicidal feelings. I experienced the side effects mildly through having the most vivid dreams for about ten days of me being on the drug.

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I remember thinking after watching I Am Legend, ‘I have just taken a new drug to stop me smoking – what if the long-term impact of taking this is something similar to what happened to those people in the film?’ At the time, I put this type of thinking down to catastrophising.

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Doesn’t sound so unrealistic now, let me tell you – especially with all the conspiracy theories which are going around about how this new virus is manmade, for various reasons ranging from population control to helping to reduce global warming.

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Let’s rewind a bit, back to my sister on my doorstop and her not being able to come into my house and her not being able to envelop me in a massive big hug in the way that only she can. The kind of hug that feels a little bit like you are going to suffocate, and yet feels so comforting and reassuring at the same time. It feels as if my whole heart is breaking – I cannot breathe and tears spring to my eyes. I get this feeling that things are going to get a whole lotta weird, and I mean off-the-scale weird. Weird like we have all never experienced before in our lifetimes. I feel that I have absolutely no control over this situation – something that does not sit very well with me.

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She senses my pain – she is feeling it too – and in that moment she makes a choice, a choice that I am more than happy with. She puts down her bag, strides over to me and envelops me in one of her massive hugs. And despite me being the big sister, the one who has placed an expectation on myself to look after her for all of eternity, I melt into the hug and sob, savouring every second of it. I do this because I know intuitively that I won’t be receiving another hug like that for a long time.

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Change is tough, especially when it is a change that we do not choose to make. When it feels like it’s forced upon us. I completely accept that the only constant in life is change – I even use this when coaching clients, and I know that with change comes an opportunity for growth. When you speak to anyone who feels successful, they will tell you that to up-level they had to implement many changes along the road, and while sometimes these changes were made by them, very often they were made by others.

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How well do we embrace change at the beginning, I wonder? How many people actually enjoy it when their world is turned upside down and inside out? I know I have never jumped with joy when God took my world and shook it up like a snow globe. Never once have I said ‘Yippeee, I have been made redundant from my job! What an absolutely joyful day! What an opportunity!’

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Does anyone?

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Reflecting on this, I have noticed that I have been trying over the past week to make sense of these changes in the world. ‘The New Norm’ as it is being called. The social distancing rules which have been introduced along with all the other changes with regards to how we are to shop, work, exercise, and live. I realise that I have been embracing said changes in a couple of different ways. Neither approach has worked or served me or the people I have discussed said changes with. In fact, I am pretty sure that my approach has irritated a lot of folks – I know I feel irritated by it. The two approaches I have adopted are denial and false