2020 So Far
2020 has been an insane year so far. Traditionally, January has been my least favorite month with its grey, cold and torrential-rain days. By late February, the earliest daffodils bravely make an appearance if not for any other reason than to establish that we are Northern California and that we have to get warm first before the colder states can follow.
Covid-19
But this year, March was when things started hitting us. And just like that we had to accept a ‘new normal’. As each day arrived, we had to cope with something new, we had to come up with new ways of dealing with a need, a routine, the way we worked, shopped, ate and slept.
The mad rush for toilet paper, stocking up on canned food and dried goods, finding no natural transition between work time and personal time, the fevered search for Covid 19-related news and information. And then, we hit 150,000 deaths in the United States. With scores of new cases, emerging daily. No one sure of the symptoms and misinformation floating around just to confuse us even more. It would make us act in ways, which in hindsight, would make more of us sick. California is particularly vulnerable given our populous nature but Covid-19 hasn’t beaten us yet.
Connecting
And that is what made me realize that we are all in a sort of unnatural, crazy, maybe even anxious state. Whether we are in the United States or Asia or anywhere else in the world, we have been impacted by this terrible virus. The virus hasn’t recognized our differences. It has treated us with painful equality. What are we doing not facing this together, then?
So social distancing prevented physical contact and interaction but it didn’t mean we couldn’t connect virtually. This made me think; I need to reach out to you.
We aren’t doing this alone. We are facing this globally.
The time for differences and division should be over. That’s my opinion. We have been politically divided in the United States in the past few years. The world, in the last two decades, has been torn apart by extremists of one type or another. I am tired of our deep divisions.
But as the Beatles, famously sang, “Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”
The Hope
We will prevail whatever the challenge. We may struggle, but you see we have each other. And so we aren’t alone. There is light. We must go through the tunnel together. Then the light will be blindingly bright and radiant.
You see, there is one thing I know. The butterfly cannot emerge without the searing restructuring, tearing away at the old, forcing regrowth through the painful, chaotic transformation into the new, into something beautiful and renewed.
So…let the metamorphosis begin. For humanity.
“We will prevail whatever the challenge. We may struggle, but you see we have one another. And so we aren’t alone. There is light. We must go through the tunnel together. Then the light will be blindingly bright and radiant.”