It's been a year since we escaped from India following the outburst of Covid. A year full of challenges, as we mentioned in some posts. Many people paid a heavy toll and we all feel the consequences one way or another, but today, we would like to take a bit of a different perspective. Today we want to tell you what we GAINED thanks to this whole situation. We made this list for you, but above all for ourselves, to think about what wouldn't have been possible or would have had little chance to happen, if not the pandemic. Ready?
We learned how to organize online workshops
We've known for years we should take on doing online workshops and courses. And for years, including the first period of the pandemic, we postponed any step in that direction. Once we started, though, online workshops occurred to be quite an interesting adventure. Definitely not replacing for good face to face meetings, but as a complementary activity it is worth more than we ever thought. It does open up opportunities in spreading our reach, lowering costs, saving time, and sharing tools. And we are still at the very beginning of exploring these possibilities and more and more platforms and tools and takes are in development out there.
We developed a lot in some important fields
We also had time to use many online resources for our own development and we went much deeper into some areas which have been a challenge for us for many years, two of the most important being... sex and money. ;) Although we had already moved forward before the pandemic, this situation gave us time to go deeper into the development part (instead of focusing on problem-solving, which makes a huge difference). And definitely in both we made a huge progress.
We got new scholarships and grants
There are some grants we had on the back of our mind for a while but we didn't have time to apply for (like the Scholarship of the Polish Ministry of Culture) or to implement once received (like the Erasmus for Young Entrepreneurs). Each of them gave us new opportunities to develop and spread our changemaking message.
We established or strengthen collaboration with some organizations
One year with stable access to the Internet and being able to meet somebody from time to time in Poland or Italy helped us also to strengthen our collaboration with some organizations, enlarging the canvas on which we paint our common dreams. Let's see where this can bring. :)
We lived with the Italian side of the family for over half a year
We spent in Italy more than 6 months all together, living with Andrea's parents. Even Andrea has not spent that much time in Fano since 2007. It was good. Beside some obvious challenge, it proved an interesting and enriching experience, so different from the constant change in place we were used to. It even gave us the feeling that, who knows, maybe one day... we could get a bit more stable. Maybe. ;)
We experimented with food
We experimented with food a lot! We had plenty of time to learn cooking from an Italian master chef, Anna started heading into vegan options, we did a 3-day water fasting and recently we came back to the idea of colourful dinners with our friends. None of these would have happened without pandemic. ;)
We visited Puglia by bike
Since the very beginning of our relationship Andrea promised Anna to take her to Puglia, south of Italy - one of his favourites. And we needed to get stuck in Italy to make the promise come true. ;) Not only did we visit Puglia, but we did it on bikes – another of our dreams came true. We did a few small trips by bike, checking how much bike-touring strikes our chords. Indeed, it seems it does!
We got married!
Last but not least, thanks to pandemic... we got married!
And what about you? What pandemic made possible for you?