Bringing Our Online World To The Dinner Table

Following our passion's can divide us from those closest to us. Yet over a good meal we can be united.

Covid19 has already changed our lives in ways we never thought possible. In my house there's six of us, technically we have two adults and four kids but the kids range from 11 - 22 and so we really have two kids and four adults.

Days have become a comfortable pattern with all of us working or doing school work, in between we all dip into our virtual world, broken up by meal times where we all come together.

The most telling part of our meal times that we share is where we find common ground. With each person in the house having built their online world their way there is a surprising amount of distance in views in some areas and in other areas close alignment of views.

On the news we all see in common it fascinates me to hear such different takes on the same news headline. Everything from what the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) said or didn't say to what's happening abroad is truly amazing. It was a huge shock to realise that kids in Spain had been freed from weeks of lockdown where they were not allowed out at all - only one adult in the house was aware this was the case. The rest of us despite all our engagement with the news had missed this completely. We had not understood the severity of lock down in our European family and the sadness we felt at learning this was uniform.

Having dinners together and being able to talk issues like this through from every side has meant that as a family we have learned a lot about what we know and don't know about our digital usage. The strangeness of the current lockdown means that we have to work hard to find common ground. The virtual worlds we exist in online allow us to follow our own paths and find like minded people to go on the journey with.

In the real world trying to find food we will all eat, topics that can be safety discussed over dinner and the a rota or work assignments for the basic things like emptying the dishwasher, all means that we have to leave our comfortable virtual world and negotiate the real things, which, unlike online can be a lot harder to do.

The good news is we've all had to give a little and lines have softened to a comfortable routine. Its rarely an ill wind that brings no good and having six weeks of meals together means we've all had a lot of practice of listening to views we wouldn't subscribe to on digital!

Bringing our digital world to the dinner table allows us to test our truths and beliefs and in doing so we are all wiser by the time we leave it.