I know it’s difficult to think long-range in the middle of a crisis that requires hourly updates and minute-by-minute adjustments to plans. But let’s try for just a moment.
Choose a date somewhere further than six months from now - is it Thanksgiving? Christmas? New Years Eve? Perhaps a big birthday coming up. See yourself there surrounded by your people. Imagine your conversation and activities, the food, the smells, the laughter and the tears. What are your hopes for that moment?
In the summer of 2017 our nation experienced a solar eclipse… A co-worker managed to get a few pair of the special glasses required to look at the sun as the moon covered it over - it was fascinating. The thing I remember most about that day, though, is the coming together in awe and wonder - people all over the nation - experiencing and living though a natural phenomenon that dazzled us…
And now, the COVID-19 reality has finally sunk in to our collective consciousness - forcing us to come to terms with significant disruption and serious individual responsibility. It struck me how the same sense from the eclipse, that feeling of “it’s happening to all of us” is true, although in this case, it is not good.