Where are you at? It is probably somewhere you are very familiar with, but somewhere that you haven’t spent quite so much time in of late.
I wrote this line back when we were about to go back to work after COVID. You hardly have a grasp on how much the landscape changed during that time. The pandemic affected interpersonal relationships, social media, politics, work — pretty much everything.
It might seem funny to pick this up now, but the line sat here with nothing attached to it. It kind of deserved a blog to be attached.
There are people who still have the physical problems COVID brought. There are people who still have to deal with the emotional trauma that resulted from that period, which seemed at points like it would never end, and for some really hasn’t.
The fragmentation of the way politics was managed made it easy for some places to be permanently destabilised. The agreement on what the event even represents still hasn’t been resolved, the disease itself remains suspect to a large swathe of people. Some people are processing the grief and some people are still steeped in the anger politicians were able to foment as the pandemic dragged on. In any event, it became a defining moment for a generation — in fact more than one generation. It was seen to crystallise the distrust brewing among certain groups, while for some people it liberated them from the pretense that had been pulled over the mechanics of how the world worked, by offering an alternative. Trying to pull back towards the old ways after altering course hasn’t been so easy for those who think they hold the reins.
Every day things change, and doesn’t that line capture some of that notion? Even if you are still, like a rock in a stream, the stream is moving around you. If you closed your eyes for a while and pretended that you weren’t changing inside and that the world mirrored that, and now you have chosen to take a look, then isn’t it very much like not having spent time in the now? Think about it. And then make a decision what that means and where to go from there.