Five Things I learned in Lockdown
2020. What a terrible f**ked up year. In recent history (leaving aside World Wars), there hasn’t been a time when time itself came to a standstill.
Wherever you live, chance are you were in some kind of lockdown, working from home (if you were lucky enough to keep your job), not allowed to go out barring the odd grocery trip.
For the first few days of my Lockdown, I was fairly excited. “Two months at home, big deal” I thought. Enter day 7 when I was ready to fight a rabid rabbit (did you expect a lion or bear? I have a healthy respect for their ability to rip me limb from limb) to get out and meet someone, anyone!
Once I made peace with the fact that I wouldn’t see another soul for months, the eternal productivity freak within me refused to give in to my desperate desire to vegetate, play computer games and binge Netflix.
Enter the learning face (cue Eye of the Tiger in the background)
Gardening: The very first thing I started doing was gardening. A dear cousin leaving Singapore gifted me some of her plants, I added lime, chilli, mint and thai basil to round out the mix and started a balcony garden!
The thing that really hit me here is that gardening teaches you several values that translate across life, namely Patience, Responsibility, Respect, Acceptance and more. I will be doing a separate post on this to build on these points
Personal Finance: Given that the World was reeling from the effects of Covid, the one thing that came to mind was Warren Buffet’s quote. “Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy”.
One thing I knew for sure, everyone was fearful. Markets were tanking across the board and it looked like a stock market crash. I went out and bought. Blue-chips mainly, some risky stocks, went out and bought till my Dad called, checking if I had lost my mind.
Now that I had jumped into the world of equities in a large way (before this I stayed true to mutual funds/ETFs) I wanted to be financially literate. The time spent then has given me a fairly strong understanding of my own finances and how I want to structure my future portfolio.
Cooking: It’s my firm belief (now that I can do it :P) that everyone can cook. It’s like this writing challenge that I’m currently doing, the first dish is barely edible, looks like crap and tastes worse but as you progress, you get better and better at ensuring that you can survive in case of a complete shutdown of food delivery companies.
Excel: Everyone has some room for improvement when it comes to Excel. For me, that room could fit a few elephants and the rest of the circus thrown in.
There are excellent online resources like Coursera here to help, this was time well spent (I see your Vlookup and raise you Randbetween).
Silence: Unexpected ending to the five eh? Silence was the last thing I would have imagined learning or becoming closer to. But after calling every person I have ever met in my life, I realized the peace and quiet of living at home, in solitude, was precious. It brought about a level of serenity I didn’t expect but grew to love. After the first wave of post-lockdown partying, I realized I was happier spending more time with myself and my thoughts, without voices, music or TV shows blaring in the background.
I would love to know more about how the lockdowns affected you!
Buzz me at avik.ashar@gmail.com to share your experiences.
