Navigating New Beginnings: My July Journey #370

I started the month with a lot of uncertainty and anxiety in my heart.

In the first week of July, I was still carrying some emotional baggage from the previous month, but I did not let that heartache stop me from showing up for my daily commitments.

I received the news about the new office space opening very soon, which would help me comply with the organization’s policies and also allow me to stay with my family at home. It felt like a miracle to have this sorted out after many months of waiting. At this point, I could no longer work fully remotely and needed to go to the office for a fixed number of days in a month.

In the second week of July, I spent time reaching out to many people to find the office route and suitable travel options. Even after talking with many people, I could barely come to any conclusion as everyone had different preferences for office commutes.

In the pre-COVID era, I lived within walking distance of my office. Although I sometimes needed to travel to other offices for training and other purposes, which were a little farther away, I never needed to travel long distances. During my undergraduate years, my college was a 1.5-hour bus ride away. But God was kind enough to help me find a place to live near my college. So all in all, I never needed to travel long distances on a daily basis.

In the post-COVID era, every company approached the problem differently to encourage their employees to return to the office. My current employer has made it mandatory to work from the office for 50% of the working days in a month. So, commuting by cab was neither a practical nor an economical choice for me. In this discussion, many of my colleagues were surprised that my family and I don’t own a car or even a two-wheeler, whereas most of them have both!

In the third week of July, I started going to the office for the first time in four years. I might have forgotten how to exist around people other than my family or friends. For the first day, my dad accompanied me, and we took a cab.

Even though he was very clear about me taking a cab to the office every day (considering my lack of experience in traveling by myself), after paying the first ride’s fare, he quickly suggested that I should take the public bus instead. The catch was that we didn’t have any direct bus from my hometown to the office location, and I was not comfortable with traveling by several buses and standing through half of my journey with a heavy backpack. Back pain is the unofficial allowance I signed up for when I started working and sitting for long hours daily.

Desperate for a middle ground, I reached out to one of my colleagues who drives to the office and was looking for co-passengers for carpooling. Earlier, I didn’t consider him as I needed to go to a pickup place to get in his car. But after the first cab ride, I was ready to make that compromise if it could save me from burning a hole in my pocket and the discomfort of riding a crowded bus in the hot summers of India.

In the third and fourth weeks, I tried to carpool as much as possible. One day, the guy bailed at the last moment, and I needed to find alternatives for 2-3 more days after they hit their monthly targets of office attendance.

It must have been God’s plan that I found out about some shuttle service in the last week of July. Even though the shuttle service had existed for a couple of years without my knowledge, they introduced some new routes connecting my hometown directly to our new office. The new routes were visible to only a few users for the first 4-5 days of the software update, and I managed to use it!

In a matter of two weeks, I had to get used to a dramatically different morning routine. I was waking up 3.5 hours earlier than my usual habit, getting a lot less time to rest during the day, and my eating habits needed adjustments too.

Some highlights from the month:

I consistently posted blogs in the first two weeks of July, mainly because I knew that for the rest of the month and year, I might not have that abundance of time.
We were blessed with our Guruji’s visit. These brief visits keep us grounded and focused on our purpose in life despite our day-to-day challenges.
Evening walks took a back seat again as my routine was all over the place.
I bought a lot of new clothes for the office as all the dresses I had were from the pre-COVID era, and I wanted to change my look. I don’t plan to throw away my old dresses; most of them are in perfect condition. I might still use some of them and give the rest to somebody else!
I was pretty disheartened to see the sharp drop in viewership of this blog. This could have been because of some recent changes that I made. In the last week of July, my website was down for multiple days, and my heart sank – I was afraid I might never be able to write here again!
This month I watched these movies: Poor Things, Black Swan, and Sita Ramam. All of them are excellent movies with no common theme. I wish to share my thoughts on these movies in a separate post.
My classes started in the fourth week of the month. The course had all its classes on weekdays along with regular students. I found both the timing and the curriculum of the course challenging. I attended two classes as it was still not clear which courses I would take for my semester. In the last week, I was waiting to get some clarity on the courses that would be offered in the semester.
The opening of the new office eased my mind in one aspect, but there were still more things to be sorted out to ensure that I could continue working from the new space. Work-wise, some days were slow and some days were more eventful, but I tried to maintain some momentum to always keep moving forward.

Room for improvement

Now that the classes will pick up pace really quickly, I will need to spend time daily to keep my backlog uncluttered.
Even though it will be more difficult now, I need to continue going for evening walks on the days I am working remotely.
I need to steer clear of social media and even YouTube as I have fried my brain with short-span content for long enough.