iStockphoto / eshneken
Am I losing my mind all cooped up at home, staring out the window at the best weather of 2020 (so far)? To be honest, a little bit. I found my mind wandering yesterday and thinking about how I can’t wait to pay TicketMaster fees in the future because it at least means I’m on my way to a concert or professional sporting event of some sort. That’s how far I’ve come in two weeks, from living my life to looking forward to getting boned by TicketMaster.
Based on everyone I’ve talked to and FaceTime’d with over the past few weeks it seems like there’s a real gamut of reactions to social distancing. Some people are at home, living their best lives, catching up on Netflix, reading books, and eating just fine. Others are getting crushed by the monotony and restriction.
KUNC is a News/Talk public radio station that for Northern Colorado and they tracked down a man who has already been social distancing for almost 50 years. He lives at 12,000-feet in isolation. He’ll go weeks without seeing anyone. He is his town’s Mayor and Chief of Police (““I’m the mayor and chief of police,” he said. “I hold elections every year but I don’t tell anybody when they are, so it works out really well.”), and he’s offering up some advice on social distancing for all the rookies out there.
You can click here to listen to his interview on KUNC or I’ve got some excerpts below.
His first tip is to ‘Keep Track of Something’. For him, that’s the weather. For me, that would normally be sports but in the absence of sports, I guess the weather will do. Or maybe it’s a good time to lose some weight and track calories in/out.
Each day, Barr tracks the weather for a number of groups including the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. He started measuring snow levels in the 1970s, mostly because he was bored.
“Everything depends on the weather,” said Barr, who had skied through snow “going sideways” and “swirling” to talk on the phone from the laboratory. “It controlled what I did and so I would write it all down.”
He’d also write down when he saw an animal.
“With the birds, especially the ones that arrive in the spring, it was exciting,” he said. “It was like, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s sunrise and I can hear robins.’”
Turns out, monitoring things that were important to his daily life had real value. As The Atlantic has written and the documentary The Snow Guardian has shown, his records have informed dozens of studies on climate change.
In the era of COVID-19, he suggests tracking what you can — or can’t — find at the grocery store. Or, better yet, participating in some citizen science, like a project called CoCoRaHS that tracks rainfall across the country.
“I would definitely recommend people doing that,” he said. “You get a little rain gauge, put it outside and you’re part of a network where there’s thousands of other people doing the same thing as you, the same time of the day as you’re doing it. It’s very interesting.” (via)
His next tip is to Keep a Routine. He wakes up around 3:30/4am and goes to sleep around 5pm. He listens to the radio, clears snow, and follows a routine.
I’ve worked from home for years. In fact, I’ve spent more of my adult life working from home than I have in an office. One habit I’ve found that helps me keep set hours/parameters is to wake up each morning and treat the day as if I was going into the office. Shower, shave, and get dressed. It trains your mind into thinking that there’s at least a switch from home life to work life. He says he tries to keep a schedule every day:
“I kind of follow a set time schedule,” said Barr. “Sometimes I forget what day it is, but I know what time it is.”
Most importantly, he said, is leaving a reward for the end of the day. He’ll read, knit something, watch a movie, and then watch a game of cricket.“It’s pretty much the same day after day. Most of it I enjoy,” he said.
Notably absent from his daily routine: keeping a personal journal. He said he used to, for about a decade or so, but then he went back and read it. “And it was so boring. It’s like, ‘Okay enough already. Let me go watch some paint dry.’” (via)
His third tip is to Celebrate The Stuff That Matters, Rather Than The Stuff You’re Supposed to Celebrate. He goes on to specify that he’s all but ditched birthdays. Sure, for some people birthdays won’t matter but for others they will. The meaningful events are different for everyone.
I kind of like how he celebrates every time he returns from getting supplies. It’s how I feel after very delivery of groceries when I’m stocked up on snacks and feel like everything’s normal for a few minutes, or how I felt yesterday when a shipment of wine I ordered two weeks ago finally arrived.
Barr has mostly ditched holidays and birthdays, but he does celebrate January 17, when sunrise goes back to what it was on the solstice.
“To me that’s a big deal because I get up so early in the morning that the lighter it gets, earlier, makes my day a lot easier,” he said.
He also celebrates when he gets back from skiing eight miles each way into the town of Crested Butte for supplies.
“Town can be kind of stressful,” he said. “So I save my favorite movies and I save my favorite meals and I save things to do so when I ski back from town and I’m home, it’s like, ‘Woohoo!’ Big party time.” (via)
His final two tips are Embrace The Grumpiness and Use movies as a mood-Adjuster.
A LOT of people are miserable right now. Unemployment is soaring. People are sick. It feels like the sky is falling. I have to catch myself with deep breaths at least once a day when it all starts to boil over. But his point is it’s okay to be grumpy about everything and it can actually work as a coping mechanism.
Sometimes, Barr said, it’s kind of satisfying to be grumpy about something.
“I do get sick and tired of snow but I like kidding about it. I live in an area where people live for snow, but I’m not that carried away with it,” said Barr, “So I like being grumpy about it. You get older and you start saying ‘Okay, I’m not going to necessarily be pleasant when I don’t feel pleasant.’”
His final tip about using movies as a mood adjuster is an interesting one. I saw someone tweet last night about how they’re watching Horror Movies for the first time in their life because it’s a reality worse than our own and a good distraction. Personally, I’ve been binging Pixar lately but only because I just got Disney+.
Films are a great 2-3 hour distraction for anyone in need of killing some time, and it’s an excellent time to catch up on any movies you might’ve missed over the past few years that you’ve been putting off watching until now.
To read/listen to the full interview, you can click here to visit KUNC.