367 days.

Friday, March 13, 2020 was a day of many lasts and many firsts.

It was the last day my daughter would set foot inside a classroom. It felt like the last day many of us would have access to groceries and household supplies, setting forth an early morning scramble to grab extra pasta... and a weeks-long search for toilet paper that stocked up my house until mid-2022. It was the first time many of our friends and neighbors started disinfecting their soup cans and leaving their mail outside for days. At work, leaders and IT professionals rushed to make telework a possibility for thousands of people for the first time, surely to last just a few weeks.

How much we didn't know back then. How much we've seen, learned and lost.

In the last 367 days, I've run about 1,100 miles. Assembled a couple of dozen jigsaw puzzles with my family. And coached a good many leaders into the transition to telework -- with all of the boundary and balance issues I've talked about here before. (I have seen countless partners, kids, beds, dogs and cats during my Zoom calls.) But I've also coached 34 clients whose journeys with me started and ended during the pandemic. Our entire engagements together passed within the common language of loss, of change, of overwhelm that humanity has been facing together for the first time in many of our lives.

As the sun starts to hang a little closer to those of us who live in northern or eastern states, as our healthcare heroes vaccinate more and more of us, as we begin, slowly, to see more of our family and friends than we have in the past 367 days, I see opportunity. Opportunity to know our work colleagues as whole human beings. Opportunity to explore the world with fresh eyes. Opportunity to grow professionally with what we've learned, what we've witnessed, together.

In the past couple of months, I've had client after client tell me they're looking for a new job, or a new industry. They're retiring, or going to graduate school. I think we are on the verge of many transitions, as this sad and unusual time has brought a lot of us around to thinking about what's really important.

If you have a transition on the horizon, I'd be happy to have a conversation about it with you. When you're ready, let's talk.

Image: W.J.Pilsak, GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons