It’s been way too long since I’ve been able to write an article for the website. I wish I could tell you it was simply me being lazy and Netflix-and-chilling. It’s been a time for learning lessons here at the Hall household during Quarantine of 2020. In actuality, I’ve been tied up helping my wife adjust to working-from-home while we have all three of our young children, ages 7, 4 and 18 months, be home due to school being cancelled and daycare being for essential workers until just this week. Now that the 2 young ones are in daycare for several days-a-week I’m able to provide this article, so lucky you 😉.

Now, I’m not complaining or venting, in fact the point of this is to do the opposite. It has made me realize how lucky I am that due to being a Medicare broker that my family is afforded the luxury of me being able to be there for them in a daily capacity. For so many worldwide, the strain of having to work-from-home while home-schooling, babysitting and non-stop being around your family is a recipe for disaster and poor mental health. It’s clear to me that quarantining is not healthy for the vast majority of us.

Because I can serve my clients by phone and we didn’t have this happen during my busy season, (October 1^st through December 7^th) I’ve been able to enroll and do my job remotely when time calls for it. My wife, who has a more demanding job than me, and I have been able to coordinate and cooperate to make sure we can keep those plates spinning 😊. All 5 of us here have been able to social distance responsibly and not put ourselves, or the people we interact with, in harms way. All of us are totally healthy, most thankfully.

The biggest thing I’ve learned during this Quarantine of 2020 has been to be grateful. Grateful for our circumstances being about as good as one could expect in a time of crisis. Grateful our marriage has been a true partnership and has not only survived through this, but actually deepened. Grateful for our kids and having a special opportunity to see them grow and be around them much more at such a critical, impressionable age. Is it neat, clean and easy? Absolutely not, but it’s been awesome to witness them and take in the small, daily interactions that help bond a family, both individually with each one and collectively as a small gang. Another cool off-shoot of this was our extended family started to do a Zoom call every week so we could all check-in on each other, since we couldn’t be together in the same rooms.

It also has taught me not to take my current clients for granted. Without them using me as an agent we could’ve been financially strapped and stressed while we waited for the okay to come out the last three months. Because of them and how this business works (residuals as opposed to getting a paycheck), we were minimally affected. Also, due to referrals and word-of-mouth of my clients I’ve been able to sign up and help by phone and over Zoom just about the same amount of folks I typically help during a non-enrollment period. Without my clients telling their friends and family about The Nice Guy it’s unlikely that would’ve been the case.

This has made for some non-stop days and nights, mainly due to the 18-month old needing constant supervision, but things have been happy and healthy for the most part. This has also helped give me the gift of acceptance. The Stoics always spoke of only investing yourself emotionally into things you had control over and this situation has really helped illustrate that point to me. Would I have chosen to be stuck at home 24/7 with my family for months? Would I have lit the economy on fire and left millions of Americans wondering about where their next meal is coming from? Or if someone coughs or sneezes wondering if it’s going to kill someone down-the-line? A most resounding ‘no’. Still, nobody ran it by me or any of us. We had to subvert ourselves to the circumstances for the greater good whether we were ready or not.

So given this setup, I chose, personally, to embrace it for what it was and got quite a bit out-of-it. Writing this may be a bit premature given we may not be out-of-the-woods yet, but if we have to do this whole mess again, I’ll make the same decision. To accept and embrace the things I can control and change (mostly my outlook and attitude toward the situation), and make the most of it. Trying to do much more than that seems like a foolish pursuit and I don’t know about you, but my Mom didn’t raise a fool! 😊 Speaking of which: Hey Mom, we miss you!