Hiba Kathawala Week 14: Quarantine Memories
Throughout our lives, we have collected millions and millions of memories. The first trip to Disneyland, our first day of school, playdates and sleepovers with friends, attending classes as a kid, and more. However, I think there is a time in all of our lives where we collected the most memories.
How is this possible, you might ask. Memories are just a recollection of time passing, right? Well, memories are often lost in the bustle of our lives, so, in my opinion, they are not equally distributed or stored throughout years.
The time I am referring to, where I believe we accumulated the most memories, is quarantine.
It was a transformative year for me, and I am sure for others too. The time spent isolated inside our homes forced us to look within to become our own companions.
For me, that meant time spent doing DIYs, learning how to paint and draw, reading hundreds of books, binging movies and TV shows, and more. Though this does not seem like memory-making material, it was a pause from my daily life. A break from the movement of everyday, from the minutes and hours spent in commute, learning at school in person, going to the grocery store, and other seemingly insignificant habitual activities opened up more time in my life than I knew ever existed. This extra time meant that I could spend more of my day doing things I enjoyed.
I created countless memories learning new crafts like macrame and crochet, or going to the park, reading books, and more. Because I had all of this new time to spend, I would fully engage myself in my activities, and this increased mindfulness at what I was doing helped my memories stick in my brain, rather than fade into the background.
So, the novelty of quarantine—it being the first time that everyone was confined to their home—and the time it opened up, led to the creation of more memories than ever. Furthermore, because of the uniqueness of that year, the memories we made are unlikely to fade any time soon as well.
Hey Hiba!
ReplyDeleteWhat an excellent blog! Quarantine, even though I probably not say this, was a great time in my life. Being isolated from everyone outside, and being there with your family, just truly made you value them even more than you already did. I picked up a couple of new hobbies during quarantine which I would never think of starting, like golf and painting, and Youtube became my best friend. I practically am a self taught golfer, and please don't ask about painting because that is still a massive work in progress :). The covid lockdown also brings back so many memories like, walking with the family outside, and meeting our friends, and just talking from a 6-feet distance, and it's really crazy how that was almost 5 years ago. I loved how you also added a paragraph about how quarantine really was a pause in life, making you stop from everything you usually did, (go to school, go to in person basketball etc,), and made you be at home. It's crazy, the date which can never be forgotten, March 13, 2020, where our teachers in elementary school told us that we might not be coming back, and from there, we did the rest of 6th grade online, and the whole of 7th grade online. New games, Among Us, Fortnite, kept us busy, but the memories were amazing. Overall, I loved reading your blog and can't wait for next week!
Hey Hiba! Glad to get a refresher on quarantine. It feels like it was just yesterday when we were all cozied up in our home and its crazy to think that its been five years already.
ReplyDeleteThe entire covid-19 era definitely serves me with a bunch of bittersweet memories. Confined in my own house, It felt as though the pandemic put me at risk of missing out on the memories of my childhood—missing my elementary school graduation, unable to hang out with my friends in summer, etc. This crucial time period in my life seemed to be spoiled with an unwelcome “life-threat;” yet, taking a more optimistic approach, and remembering what that time was really like, I can safely say that lockdown was filled with new experiences that changed my outlook and appreciation for everything I have. I learned to cherish my friends and family, because being deprived of them was a realization I was not fond of. I learned to utilize my time to its fullest, because even with the exception of staying at home all day, the minutes, the hours, the days, and the weeks went by quickly. I learned to take care of my health, both mental and physical, because living in a period where people’s lives were continuously on the line made me understand the importance of the inevitable outcome of all the small actions that work towards preserving my health daily—washing hands, keeping my room tidy, focusing on my diet.
Covid is the epitome of all the things we should extract from the memories we should create. Over the duration of a year in quarantine, I came to the ultimate conclusion that memories serve as something we learn from, something we grow from, and something that constitutes the person we are today. So, along the lines of any future endeavors, it is imperative that we seize each moment, each opportunity, because we never know when we can lose it all.
Hey Hiba, the quarantine memories were honestly some of the most legendary ever. I could not believe that there was a global pandemic going on. I remember the zoom calls for school, and there were so many times when I would just sit and stare at the screen wondering if school would ever go back to normal. But some of the best times happened during Covid too. The calls with my friends where we would play on Minecraft servers or hop on Fortnite and try to win a victory royale. Those were such fun times, and some of the lowest pressure times.
ReplyDeleteHey Hiba! You did a great job with this blog; a couple of my posts from last semester were also about the Covid era, so seeing your take on a similar topic is definitely thought-provoking. Like you said, quarantine was a really transformative year for many. Personally, it made me genuinely step back, consider and appreciate all the family, friends, and people who were around me and strove to maintain connections and a sense of normalcy in such a weird period of our lives. But quarantine was also a time for new experiences; during those 2-3 years, I tried to make the most of my time, exploring a bunch of random hobbies, like guitar, Rubiks cubes, gardening, cooking, and coding. It reshaped my perspective on life in that I realized that there were a lot of things people did with their time, and how fragile human life really is.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, a lot of people say that their lives would be way better without Covid, but personally, I think that it was a great opportunity for life to slow down, and give me the chance to do my own thing without external influences judging me. And post-covid, I would say that it made me more open to forming new relationships, and more interested and involved in the world around me. Thank you for writing this blog; it really helped me reflect on how much I've grown in the past couple of years.