In the past year or so, we have learned how to study, work, and communicate with the outside world, friends, and other family members from the comfort and convenience of our homes and have come to really enjoy it.
Thinking back to English class
Remember back to high school English, or perhaps Freshman English class in college, words that often would strike terror in students would be “write an essay about …” It was even more terrifying when it was a specific length such as 2-pages or 1,000 words or when it was due the next day, although this post that you are reading now is over 800 words. It’s not so hard to do when you have something you believe in or are passionate about expressing. It’s much harder when the topic is provided or you’re not that enthusiastic about saying anything on the subject.
A classic homework assignment for the first day or week returning to school after the summer break was to write an essay about “How I spend my summer vacation.” This sounds simple, but when trying to reduce weeks of fun and activities into a few sentences, a writer’s block often was the result. The summer was fun to be sure, but we had trouble describing it so that it sounded like fun to others who might be reading what we wrote. Alternately, we might find our words not commensurate to the feelings we wanted to express.
Writing about our homes
If we were tasked with writing an essay on why we like our homes, we should have an easier time than trying to create an essay on a subject that we know less about or are not as invested as we are with our homes – especially since we have come through the past several months of developing a much closer bond with our homes. Let’s just think of the many things we like and appreciate about our homes – even if we don’t think we might not be that good at expressing them.
Given the assignment to write an essay on the many reasons why we love our home and want to remain living in it should be relatively easy to do. We can recount the advantages of the location and why we find that appealing, including it being quiet for our needs, the attractive neighborhood setting and beauty, and how relatively safe we feel as we go for a walk or jog – or leave our windows or screen door unlocked.
We can continue as we talk about the general layout and floor plan of the interior of our home and how that makes us feel just being in the space, the size of the rooms and what they allow us to do in them, and the overall feeling of comfort and security that we feel just being in our home.
Focusing on the positive
Sometimes it takes an assignment like this to cause us to reflect on the many reasons that our homes do work well for us. Many of us a so much more prepared to write that essay today than we were a year ago. We have spent some serious time in our homes over the past few months and have really gotten to know they can accommodate our needs.
If we have identified any weaknesses or areas that we would like to improve our homes to make them even better for us, we have that opportunity going forward. We know that they basically are fine the way they are and that we can make some modifications to them as we desire to make them even better.
What the future holds
We don’t know if we will have future lockdown situations where we will be staying at home for extended periods, or if we may choose to do so anyway because of what we have learned about our own needs and behaviors as well as what our homes will allow us to do. We can study, work, keep house, fellowship with loved ones, and be much more self-sufficient and self-reliant than we had given ourselves credit for being able to do. Many of us had never been challenged like this previously.
If we are near the end of our fulltime employment days, or we have learned how to do our job from the comfort and convenience of our home, or we want to begin a home-based business, we know that we will be happy and comfortable using what our homes have to offer.
This has been an unprecedented time for many people, but largely we have learned that we like our homes, don’t mind spending extended periods of time in them, and that we can survive quite well by remaining at home. This is allowing us to take more control of our lives even though the initial situation was thrust upon us. We have adapted quite well and can complete our essay about liking and wanting to remain in our homes because we do – and we look forward to many more happy and satisfying times.