What We Should Do

 We've almost made it a year.  

Some of us received covid shots, others remain at home, but this year of cloistered living, it's changed us in ways we do not yet know.  It's visible in the grocery stores. People don't go in there relaxed, they go into the stores in a rush, they do not make eye contact and they do not stop.  It's visible when you visit a college campus, and the pick up football or students sitting together or walking holding hands, isn't visible.   

Tonight, for some reason, we needed out, out of the routine, out of the house, just out.  So we drove to the drive thru of a local establishment and ordered ice cream.  It was a little thing, and yet restorative of something of the reality we miss, the reality we've not known since March 12th of 2020.   

How do we reset our psyches?  I am not really worried about it, once we don't have to worry about it.  I'm certain we will rejoice almost excessively once we can go to a football game, dance or store without masks, and can do the ordinary things of ordinary life like errands and dates and birthday parties out in the world without risking our families or ourselves.   

It's the time between then and now that will be the hardest.  This is no longer new. The trick is to not try to do more than today until tomorrow is today.  We do have to do it again the next day and the next and the next, but by doing so, we won't gnash our teeth at how long we've endured this, we will instead focus on the battles of the day we face and no others.   It will mean we spend less time cursing the battles we've already fougth and won or lost.   It will mean, we do not despair because of how long this is taking to "flatten the curve," but hope because we've made it so far.   

We've made it so far...we've made it so far.  We've made it so far, getting ice cream in a drive thru felt like a rebellion, like a form of defiance, of manufactured triumph.  We will make it...and when we do, we should all sign a baseball with the year and the date we emerge from this mess, because we succeeded.