By now we are four months into the lockdown that started in March & it looks like life as we knew it has changed forever. Of course, after September 11 life changed monumentally as well but because we have 19 years distance between that event and life today, most of the changes seem normal now. Life does change, sometimes slowly and sometimes drastically but not all of those changes are for the worse. While we are still managing the fallout from recent events, some people are saying that they appreciate things like being able to work from home, not rushing from activity-to-activity all the time, and spending more time together as a family (although, some people feel the opposite is true).

One of my favourite pandemic activities has been getting together once-a-week with friends to play Trivial Pursuit. Now, I am a HUGE trivia buff but I have terrible recall. My friends on the other hand are trivia masters & one of them has even been on Jeopardy. So while my chances of winning are low, that’s not the point. The point is that I get to virtually see my friends – in three different time zones & two different countries – and we get to laugh & joke and play games. For a very small window of time I get to connect with my friends & it feels almost normal.

We all know that online meetings lack the intimacy of in-person connection but it’s better than no connection at all. I’ve gone from seeing all of them in the past year to probably not seeing them at all for at least a year. That is the problem when some of your closest friends live far away. But we are no strangers to distance: our connection was brought together because of the internet and so we are used to most of our communication being digital. So our weekly TP game is just in addition to our interaction both online and via group chats.

Honestly though, our weekly game is one of my favourite nights of the week. It can be chaotic with dogs, kids, and people eating dinner (that pesky time zone issue) but for me, it’s become one of the best things to have come out of this pandemic. I really hope that when things get normalized and when we can do other things with our evenings that we really make the effort to continue our game night on some scale. It’s really nice to connect with your friends even if it is only virtually.