Life happens. Every day we wake up to go through our daily routines as parents, wives, husbands, and students with thoughts of what to wear, when to go grocery shopping, what to make for dinner, a paper that is due, project deadlines at work, etc. We are so focused on the mundane things, and struggle to find time to enjoy nature, be creative, be with our friends, exercise, read a book, and the most difficult goal, get enough sleep. To some extent, we feel deprived, and we are always in a race to catch up with a life we can’t seem to reach.
Change knocked on our door. When we opened it covid put its big ugly foot on our threshold and prevented us from shutting it out. What we considered a monotonous schedule was thrown into the tornado, called the pandemic. Everything we thought normal became unrecognizable. Instead of sitting in rush hour traffic to go to work, if we were lucky, we got to go to our kitchen, dining room, or couch and take a meeting. We became the lonely coworker in a sci-fi dystopian cubicle. Social distancing shrunk our time with friends and family down to laptop and iPhone screens. The once dreaded errand to the supermarket became a trip of gratitude because there was still food that we could buy. We felt the Gods smiling down on us when we scored a roll of paper towels or bathroom tissue but cursed us when we became the teacher and principal to our children. Our smile, our greatest evidence of humanity, was hidden behind an array of face masks that became an essential wardrobe accoutrement. The stillness and peace we thought we wanted, became an overwhelming tedious roster of tasks.
A year or so later, there was another knock on our door. It was Pfizer who offered a safe passport back into the outside world, our community, and extended family. There was no waiting for holidays. We had a reason to celebrate family get-togethers and cook a turkey and ham even though it was May. We were deeply grateful to still be alive and not a part of the pandemic statistic. For those we lost, we wished we could share one more meal, or one more argument even though we disagreed, so we could hear their voice. Most importantly, we realized that the small stuff we used to sweat was really an opportunity to perfect our goals and dreams.
Change arrives in so many ways. The pandemic has given us new eyes with which to view ourselves, our family, our careers, politics, and the world. It required we rearrange the apples on our cart. It helped us to recognize and relegate the badly bruised and inedible ones to the compost with the hope that their decomposition will become the fertilization for a fruitful future. Our saving grace is that, as humans, we can take every transformation and use it to renew our passions, and our resolve to start a new day. We have another chance to give breath to something that will inspire and make our lives and those of others richer and more meaningful. We get to create with an understanding that we are still here because we have a deeper story to tell. We made it through the tempest, that is still swirling in the distance. Change did not enter our life to leave us speechless. It entered our life to bring us back to life so we can write now.
