About six months ago, in the middle of March, I packed up a few things from my office for what we thought would be a brief three-week work from home (WFH) period while we sorted some things out. Six months later, here we are… still very much working from home. It is crazy to believe over six months have already passed by and how much has happened in that time.

Adjusting to this new normal has definitely been just that, an adjustment. In the beginning, I told myself that all of this was temporary. I kept telling myself, just one more week, or just another couple weeks, or maybe at the end of this month we’ll get the go-ahead to return to our offices and get back to normal. And that day never came. Eventually, it hit the point where I needed to make some decisions about how to move forward, even though there wasn’t a clear plan of what moving forward would look like at the time. As you may know, I made the call to come back to the Okanagan and eventually decided to leave my place in Vancouver to stay here semi-permanently, until at least the new year.

Somewhere in all of that time of changes and adjustments, I suppose I slipped into accepting work from home as the new normal. So many people refer to it that way now, as the “new normal”, but it’s true. Changing departments a couple of months ago additionally shifted lots of things as our new normal involves doing everything virtually, rather than travelling as per usual – which has been a hard pill to swallow. It definitely has been strange and taken some additional adjustments, but it finally feels like I have adjusted (as best as can be) to this new normal of working from home.

It is hard to picture or remember what working in an office feels like. It feels so long ago and it’s truly crazy to believe that six months have already passed. It’s got me thinking what the next six months are going to look like, and how long this situation is really going to continue for. I have a feeling our work from home situation will extend for quite a few more months, if not another six months or longer. I have mixed feelings about continuing to work from home – on the one hand, I do feel I have finally adjusted to working from home and going back to the office would now be an adjustment. On the other hand, it would be so nice to be back in the office working with colleagues again. I suppose we can’t get our hopes up for what the situation could be, as we never know what the future might hold and things can always change.

I suppose in another sense, we can’t continue to sit around and wait to see what the outcome will be. There is something to be said for taking action and making decisions even with the uncertainty of what the future could look like. It’s definitely something I struggle with, and it took me awhile to reach the point where I made a decisive decision about how I would move forward. As the situation continues to develop, I am sure I will have other important decisions I need to make. Finding a way to move forward even in times of uncertainty is necessary, particularly for these next few months.

At the end of the day, this crazy world we live in will continue to change and we need to continue to change along with it. I hope you’re all along for the ride – looks like it’s going to be a wild one.