Off Topic: Covid-19 and remaining positive

Covid-19 has hit the majority of us hard, coming through like a freight train it has torn families apart, snatched people away from jobs they have held for almost their whole lives and made us all miserable. Yet as bad as this situation has been for most of us, I do try to find the positives where I can and for me there have been a few.

Early on at the beginning of the year I lost a job that I really didn’t enjoy in the slightest which was a blessing in disguise. I then sort of floated from job to job over the first half of 2020 but I’d keep coming into contact with people in the same boat as me and people in far worse situations than me.

People from all different walks of life, those fresh out of University, those who had just moved to the area and those that had been in the same job for the last thirty years. We were all well and truly in this together and we began making friends with each other with and working in partnership with so many people we would otherwise probably never have crossed paths with.

Maybe some of the jobs I’ve done since then were not exactly my cup of tea, but each one lead me to a new opportunity and taught me something new. I’m in the job I have now because of the experiences I’ve had in the past and I’ve had the great opportunity to work with people from so many different working backgrounds. I’ve had these unique opportunities to learn from people I would never have worked with otherwise and better myself both professionally and personally.

I was quite lazy since returning from Australia in October 2019 and I expected things to just fall in to place upon my arrival but they never really did, I took a job I knew I’d hate because I HAD to earn money and was becoming quite miserable to be back in the UK, but thanks to the guidance of my wife I tried to learn what I could from this job and make it a worthwhile experience overall. Even while searching for another job after redundancy my wife suggested I take the time to learn something new and better myself.

I was hesitant at first due to the financial hit that would this would initially be but was able to put the time and effort into becoming a TEFL certified English Teacher and now I regularly get the chance to teach people from all different countries around the world. While that won’t pay the bills, the added bonus at the end of the month and things I’ve learnt from my students is amazing and it’s all because I took the chance to do something rather than be miserable at the situation I was in.

I think we have to take the opportunities presented to us in this terrible time and work our asses off to better our futures,  unfortunately not everyone is going to come out of the other side of this thing unscathed so we need to lay the foundations for our future now so that we can survive, pump money back into our economies, travel around the world once again and get everything back on track. I think this virus has shown us some of the fragility of mankind and that all It really takes is something small to explode into a worldwide event.

I see all these local businesses from my home town and other places I’ve lived over the years, those I’d visit all the times and those that I never got around to. Each and every single one of them are suffering or already gone, we can’t save them all but we can do our best to show our support to them.  

So please support your local businesses as best you can, support you friends, support your families and please ask for support for yourselves if you need it. We are well and truly all in this together.