It seemed like a moderately achievable New Year's resolution just five months ago - simply to make time.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
But there could have been no comprehension that it could be achieved quite so easily.
For since the coronavirus shutdown the challenge for those no longer able to follow established routine through work, family or social interaction has been to remain engaged.
For those whose daily lives are intertwined with others through sport, the arts, hobbies or volunteering the connection was lost without a fight.
Our lifestyle has adapted and changed - opportunities grasped against an unparalleled background of uncertainty
Many Australians were happy to be complicit in the closedown of much of society because they saw the portents of a much bigger battle that needed to be waged.
But the question now is for how long can the commitment to be sustained.
In pre-pandemic days Australians were accustomed to daily orations from politicians, economists and the commentariat about how things were, should be and how almost impossible it was to change any of that. For the past four months, we have added medicos and scientists - perhaps whose views we are more likely to accept at face value.
We have been for the most part compliant - a stark contrast to earlier days when we would question, debate and argue the point ad nauseam.
We have acquired a new vocabulary. We are still not sure whether its "social" or "physical" distancing but we've got the message.
PPE is a sure-thing for acronym of the year.
We've found a new appreciation for graphs - suddenly making those previously questionable hours in primary school maths classes worthwhile.
Flattening the curve has taken on a whole new meaning.
We now know that when patients are moved from one hospital to another that they have been decanted.
We have managed to prefix just about every activity in our daily lives with a touch of "iso-"
There have been a significant range of new skill acquisitions - Zoom and Microsoft Teams are surely certainties for the new-normal.
And of course, there's been a massive dose of appreciation for others - especially the broader medical profession and our educators.
Television broadcasters have been content out of necessity to provide us with inferior production quality simply to get the stories out there. It's something they have eschewed for decades in the expectation that we would not accept anything other than top-notch.
The shutdown has brought us things now that we had been told we couldn't have just yet - such as TeleHealth and brought us back some things we might have thought were gone like a weekly dose of HG and Roy.
It was always going to happen - although the now familiar voice of Norman Swan anticipated that it would more likely be the shock jocks first up - but there is a growing number of economists who are questioning this strategy that has guided us since March.
Surely they cannot be so committed to their own rhetoric that they cannot see the comparison with so much of the rest of the world.
And here we are not talking about poorer nations but fully developed economies with similarly sophisticated health and welfare systems.
Australia has 100 deaths attributed to COVID-19 - each one a sad and significant loss but this number pales by comparison with those countries most often referenced and extremely so with others not so regularly mentioned like Belgium.
Against this background alone it is difficult to pay any credence to the argument that Australia and fellow travellers like New Zealand and Taiwan over-cooked the cautionary approach.
It's surely way harder to pay any homage to the mindless displays of macho-madness from the leadership of other nations.
Boris Johnson's sense of infallibility which including shaking hands with fellow Brits with confirmed symptoms spectacularly backfired in the most personal of ways.
Donald Trump had found myriad ways to descend into his own special world of inanity - leaving his nation-leading the free world in ways in which it would prefer not.
And then enter stage right the much lesser-known Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro whose indifference to what is happening in his country will soon see it slot in behind the US in the confirmed cases and death count.
Ordinary Australians made our leadership's task much easier by comprehending what was at stake. They accepted measures that seemed over the top or irrelevant to them because the broad brush was simpler to explain and enforce.
Many will also get the need to remain cautious.
But having done so well it's not unreasonable that many will now expect a horses-for-courses approach.
In the speed of the lockdown, it was not a time for intricate detail. But that's not the case now.
Expecting the nation to hold its collective nerve is getting that fraction harder.
- Brian Roe, sports administrator and former Labor candidate