My wife’s preferred exercise regimen is attending circus aerials classes where she practices doing tricks and poses on a trapeze, hanging silks and a rope. Before the pandemic she was going to two or three such classes a week. After everything shut down in March, she started doing exercise routines on Zoom with her sister, who lives a couple of hours away in Manhattan. Sometimes they work out with a live trainer and other times with YouTube exercise videos. When a friend of ours was staying with us during the summer and early fall, she often joined Jennifer and her sister for those workouts. Then they invited my sister, who lives in Connecticut, to join them, and more recently, Jennifer’s sister-in-law in Virginia started participating occasionally as well.
Jennifer is now back to attending circus aerials classes a couple of times a week but continues to work out with her virtual exercise group on days that she doesn’t have an in-person class. So here are five friends and relatives, most of whom used to see each other maybe twice a year, who are now enjoying each other’s company several times a week. And they love it. Not only are they getting more exercise, they’re enjoying the kind of relationship that you’d typically see only among people who live close to each other.
This is all a long way of noting that while it’s clear that the pandemic has changed things, it’s not so clear to what degree things will continue to be different after the pandemic is over. My wife’s virtual exercise club is likely only one of many pandemic adaptations people have devised over the last several months that have turned out to have some advantages over the routines they replaced.
As I’ve noted before, I’m one of a group of friends, a men’s group, that has for years been getting together once a month over cheese and crackers and a bottle of wine. A couple of years ago we lost one of our members when he moved to Singapore for a great job opportunity. But when the coronavirus forced us to meet virtually we were able to invite our erstwhile member to rejoin us. That means we’ll have a difficult decision to make when the pandemic is over: do we resume our in-person get-togethers or continue to meet virtually so that we can include our friend in Singapore? (In theory, it may be possible to take a hybrid approach, but I’m not sure how satisfying that would be for the lone virtual participant.)
The news has been full of articles about how the pandemic has likely hastened the demise of movie theaters, the decline of brick-and-mortar retail, and the growth of working from home, but I wonder how many other changes, big and small, will persist once the pandemic is over. Only time will tell.