It is no doubt that this quarantine has been extended for a quite a while across the world. It is also no doubt that although this quarantine has been extended, this quarantine has in some ways given us the gift of free time. Over this period of time, I found that there are many things we could dedicate this gift to either develop new skills, learn new lessons, or use it to relax.

Over this quarantine period, I gave learned a few things from a podcast I listened to. The podcast is called “The Girl Who Fell From the Sky” on futilitycloset.com. It is about a girl named Juliane Koepcke who lived in the jungle with her family who does research on the jungle but is forced to go back to school in order to continue with her education. While flying the plane to get back to school, the plane crashes in to the forest and she is the only survivor, so Juliane had to survive 11 days in the Peruvian forest. The podcast describes her hardships and her problems before she makes contact with any civilization. I find this story interesting because a theme that I got from this was how she never gave up to reach her goal. This story is all about taking your environment and survive I feel that kind of lesson is needed right now because this is probably one of the first few quarantines across the world to prevent an illness from spreading in history, so although we are not surviving in the ruthless jungle, we are trying to survive within the walls of our own home which to some extent is more troublesome at some points. In the jungle, all free time is taken away and it’s all about the present, now we are given an abundance of time and we are in charge of how to deal with this and sometimes this has a lot of pressure to it. Although this podcast has not given me ideas about what I should do, it has definitely inspired me to do at least something with this free time I’m given. Although I can’t think of something to do for myself, I recommend that you pickup habits that other people in your house do, such as me, I follow my parents with cooking the food.

Also over this quarantine, I have read another piece of writing, the name of the poem is “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shihab Nve, it is about how a woman is sad at a terminal and a random woman at the terminal comes up a cheers her up in her own language, and it turns out she was sad all due to a miscommunication with the language barrier. Once the woman is happy, she hands out treats to everyone in her gate, Gate A-4, making everyone in the gate happy. There are quotes in the poem I really like about it, the quotes are, “This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person” and “This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost”. In a way this poem reminds me that there is a way for me to experience long term happiness in quarantine.

So in general, these two lessons I got are what I try to apply to myself in order to still grow in quarantine.