Getting Back to Life & Re-Entering the Real World

by Jay K. Hummer

The world is back! What pandemic? It appears most people have forgotten about masks, social distancing, and all things connected with COVID-19. In fact it has hit the streets in a hard way. I mean this literally, since the number of walkers in my suburban neighborhood has decreased dramatically. During the COVID shutdown, our quiet suburban street felt like a busy city block. There was never a time when you would not see walkers. Early morning? Check. During a rainstorm? Check. At all hours of the night? Check. During snowstorms? Check. It was amazing the number of people that were outside walking.  

Introverted?

Having been a pre-COVID walker in the neighborhood, I felt like a new kid at school-there were so many people I had never seen. This brought a surprising number of emotions. Meeting new people is always nice, but I was surprised to see the number of the new people who could barely look up and acknowledge my presence. As a personable guy, this took some getting used to.

At first I was taken aback, but as I ran into more of these unsocial folks I started to feel bad for them. I said to my daughter one day while on a walk, that we were lucky and not in their skin. Let’s face it, you never know what someone else is going through. And that is where I left it: the unfriendly walkers must be experiencing a bad day, and it was great that they were outside trying to feel better.

True to yourself

I did make myself a promise that I would be true to myself. Even if the last person I saw could not even acknowledge my hello, I would still offer that warm greeting. In fact I went a little further.

About half way through the pre-vaccination pandemic, I decided to move this issue a step ahead: I started to introduce myself to anyone who I did not know by name. This was great fun. First, it shocked people and second, I now had another person to address by name next time I walked by them, and made my walks more social in a time of social distancing.  

Recently, as people have started to return to the office, the number of walkers has diminished, almost to the point where it was pre-pandemic. The regulars are still there, butI only saw one person outside of my home office window during the rainstorm today.

So many of us have gotten used to the freedom of working out of our homes, I felt ecstatic, elated? for people, that they finally had some freedom. They could take a break from work and go outside! 

Re-entry tips

So now that many are shifting back to the corporate office, how can they stay connected to every day field trips?

  1. Decrease commuting: The first thing we must do is get the number of commuting days decreased. If you normally work five days at the office, try to negotiate with your company for three or four days at the office. This will give you one or two days where you can save commuting time, and turn that time into a fun field trip activity.

  2. If you are successful in negotiating that extra day or two to work out of your home office, you must commit to a start and end of your work day. I know this is hard, it is easy to wake up and get right into your home office. Big business has realized they benefited from having so many of their employees working at home. Americans are hard working folks, who put their nose to the grindstone and give it their best. Instead of waking up and getting right at your job, take that commuting time to take a walk, a field trip to a great breakfast place, catch a sunrise, or get a workout in.

There is something soothin about the water

  1. While working in the corporate office, or at the home office: Take a lunch break every day that does not include working at your desk. You can visit a swanky new restaurant or drive to a great spot for a picnic lunch with someone special. The great thing about lunch is that you get it everyday, on another day take that lunch break on the go, stop at the food truck or other vendor and grab your food then head out for a sightseeing event in the city that you work in. Most people have never visited many of the great sights in their own city. The choices are endless, and it beats going to the company cafeteria.

  2. When I used to work in corporate America, I would get tired at about 3:00 PM, out of pure desperation (so I would not fall asleep in a meeting) I held many of my afternoon meetings by taking walks. Let your team know in advance that you may call an afternoon walking meeting at a moment's notice, so they can keep a pair of comfortable shoes nearby. A combo work-field trip that gets your endorphins and metabolism going while keeping you fresh and literally on your toes.

  3. If you do have the commute back in your life, take the long way home and see a sunset. Ask your family to meet you there.

  4. Meet friends for dinner after work, or maybe dancing, or that karaoke/piano bar?

  5. Never, ever, ever miss your kids' ball games, concerts, tiddlywinks matches (you get the idea), there is nothing more important. If that big customer cannot schedule around this, can you imagine what a bear he will be to work with for years? And if your boss does not understand, that is also a big clue to find a new boss.

I would choose to watch my son pitch over a business meeting, any day of the week.

Let's go!

As your work life returns to normal, you will once again start traveling more. This is field trip bonanza time!  Going to the city on a business trip? The absolute worst thing you can do is show up to your hotel and go to your meeting as planned and repeat this boring process for the duration of your trip. Are you kidding me, there is so much to see. This may take a little planning on your part. I personally would start the minute I drop my bags at the hotel. What lays outside the doors for you to discover? Theaters, museums, restaurants, dancing, bike trails, walking, parks, water, sightseeing, people and more people! So much to see and do. Work is back and it is going to be a blast!!  What are you waiting for??

“I’ve spent my whole life blurring the boundaries between work and play. Being a fun seeker since childhood, I figured out how to take every opportunity to do the things I love—playing sports, eating good food, connecting with people, and seeing the world.” – Jay Hummer

 Award-winning franchise executive, successful entrepreneur, former radio personality, baseball coach, world traveler, and overall fun-seeker, Jay Hummer’s new mission is to help others find joy in their life every day.

Writing Semi-Autobiographical Fiction with Leila Slimani

This is the first novel in a semi-autobiographical trilogy inspired by your family’s story. What do you feel fiction allows you to explore that a nonfiction autobiographical retelling wouldn’t?

In nonfiction, one undertakes to tell the truth, i.e. to render reality, to verify the established facts. People who have existed or still exist have their lives laid out in a book. I don’t like that and, as Toni Morrison said so well, I believe that people own their lives and that we cannot dispose of them. I’m not interested in factual truth—I didn’t want to feel constrained by that. What interests me is Literature, i.e. the possibility of delving deeply into the soul of each character. I want to achieve a certain truth in the evocation of feelings, in the description of a landscape or an emotion. Imagination is the strongest, most powerful human capability. It allows everything: you can move in time, in space, create worlds. That’s what I look for when I write, and when I read, too.

What part of the story is autobiographical?

In the Country of Others is centered around a couple, Amine and Mathilde, and they are inspired by my actual grandparents. He is Moroccan; she is French. He is small, silent, swarthy; she is tall, blond, adventurous. They marry in 1945 and move to a Morocco under French colonization, marked by racism and the rejection of interracial marriages. My grandmother met my grandfather when he, a Moroccan soldier, was stationed in Alsace, where she was from. They fell in love and she did move with him to Morocco. It was very unusual for a French woman to do this: a white woman marrying a Moroccan man, then moving to Morocco.

The tension between love and violence shapes each character in the novel, and at times, it feels as if one cannot exist without the other. What do you think these unforgiving yet highly realistic characterizations reveal about humankind?

Indeed, I believe that our lives are marked by this tension between attraction to others and repulsion. We are attracted to others; we want to love them and be loved by them. But, the older we get, the more we realize that there will always be a distance between us and others. A part of us remains inaccessible to them and solitude is unavoidable. And then, others constrain us, weigh us down, lock us up. How can we be free with others? And at the same time, what would be the point of living if others did not exist?

In the Country of Others is such a powerful title. At first thought, it refers to Mathilde’s decision to leave her native Alsace forever and move to Morocco with Amine, but the further you get into the novel, it becomes a larger comment on the power dynamic between colonizer and colonized and women living in the world of men. Can you discuss this a bit more?

In essence, we all live in the country of others—it’s part of the human condition. Our whole life will be marked by this dialogue between ourselves and others. How can we find our place without losing ourselves? “The country of others” is, first of all, a definition of colonization. When your country is colonized, you no longer live “at home” but in the country of others. The others are, generally speaking, the powerful, the dominant, those who dictate the law. Women live in the country of others and the others are men. They are the ones who tell them what they are allowed to do, how they should speak, dress, behave. All the dominated feel that they are living in the country of others, that they are subject to the law of the strongest. At the same time, there is also a brighter vision of the country of others. This is the country I live in as a writer. I would like to understand the others, to know them. A whole lifetime is not long enough for me to be able to write everything I would like to. 

The lémange tree is a distinct metaphor for Amine and Mathilde’s union and the family they create, one that’s both beautiful and deeply sad. Can you elaborate?

This lémange tree is a metaphor for the Belhaj family and, more generally, for all mixed-race families. Aicha, the mixed-race child, has difficulty finding her place in society. And her father, who is a farmer, is going to make a cross between a lemon tree and an orange tree. He explains to her that it is a bit like her: she is half lemon and half orange. This tree is a bit worrying, a bit “monstrous.” On the book’s cover, we can see that this strange fruit is not right—the orange color is dripping. How can you be two things at once? Are you obliged to choose one side over the other? We don’t really know what it is and the fruit it produces is very bitter. Crossbreeding can enrich and, at the same time, be painful because instead of belonging to two separate things, you belong to nothing at all. And it is always others who decide for you what you are and lock you into boxes.

In the final pages, Aicha joins her parents while looking in the distance as Moroccan liberation fighters burn down colonists’ houses. It’s a contrasted moment of intimacy between them as they watch violence unfold. What do you think this moment represents for Aicha?

Aicha is still a child and I don’t think she’s capable of political opinion, but what I like about this little girl is that she is both very wise, very observant and at the same time capable of extreme violence. At the end of the book, she feels a kind of satisfaction in seeing that those who humiliated her father, those who made fun of her, are losing. She doesn’t really understand what this conflict means, and her reaction is like a child who has been humiliated and sees the possibility of regaining her dignity.

LEILA SLIMANI is the author of the award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling The Perfect Nanny, one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year, and is French president Emmanuel Macron’s personal representative for the promotion of the French language and culture. Her new novel, IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS, draws on her own family's inspiring story for this story about race, resilience, and women's empowerment. The first novel in a planned trilogy, IN THE COUNTRY OF OTHERS was named a Best Book of the Summer by Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Observer, and Parade