Emma Luxardo – COVID-19

During the past months I haven’t experienced proper isolation myself since I have always gone to the office. But I have seen it through others in the family. First of all through my mum who lives alone and in Milano! She stayed home for two full months and I had to assist her with shopping online, keeping company and medical issues. At the end of the two months of lockdown she was looking forward to going out and restarting her volunteering activities. I was worried about her going out but she became very upset and said to me: “What kind of life is staying home alone with your days centred only around eating and sleeping? Because at the end of the day with no social interaction you also lose your interest in everything else”.

My daughter Daria here in Australia has always continued to go to school and has enjoyed the small classes due to many absent students. This was similar to how it was in Italy where she was at first in a class of 14 and 8.

My son Mirco is attending university: I think he has paid the highest price. In July he should have gone to study in Singapore for a semester but everything is now postponed. He was due to go with a group of students to Shanghai, to Sydney, to attend an important conference with the presentation of a paper of which he is one of the authors… everything cancelled, hopefully just postponed. Furthermore, his lectures are only online which is absolutely not the same.

My husband usually works from home so he didn’t notice a big difference.

Going back to my experience, what this period gave me was a sense of much more connection. I moved to Australia less than 4 years ago and since then I have felt isolated from my “previous life and world”. On the one hand with the pandemic I could again enter my previous life, my theatre, my conference hall, my Life Coaching school (I have attended lots of new updates and PDs), my museums… I realize now that my children and I have lived in a sort of self-isolation these past 4 years and for this reason maybe we were more resilient to a such big change of life and ready to cope with it.

Last but not least, during lockdown I could think “out of the box”, order my desires  and have a clearer view of the path I want to travel along. It was a very personal and insightful decluttering period which put me back in touch again to what makes and what doesn’t make me happy and who I am really am.