Tag: COVID-19

She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.
~George Eliot in Middlemarch

As civilization begins to emerge from pandemic restrictions and mandates, it is crucial to review the lessons learned over the past two years. Worldwide we’ve simultaneously become more unified in our shared experience of isolation and quarantine and also more divided in our opinions about its necessity. Whether we agree or not on the details of COVID-19 prevention and management, we have learned much more about ourselves.

We are natural complainers when we feel our familiar freedoms are taken away, no question about it. Despite our ongoing feelings of deprivation and inconvenience, most of us have still been blessed with shelter, warmth and sustenance during this time. Some of us have had others around us in isolation, and others of us wish we could have had more quiet and privacy. We’re more used to waiting in lines for our turn, and encountering empty store shelves when we need something.

Medical care has been a challenge to access, both for COVID-related illness and everything else that usually happens to our minds and bodies daily. We even feel the need to complain about people complaining.

So I remind myself daily that nearly a million of our U.S. brothers and sisters have gone missing in action over the last two years, lost to the COVID battle, and though the vast majority survived, they (we) will never be the same.

Now as we look out our windows, we are no longer mere spectators at what is transpiring around us, but are rejoining our palpitating existence alongside others.

God only knows where we would be without each other. We can’t forget what we have shared together – our view out our window is unique to each of us, yet so familiar no matter where it is in the largeness of the world.

Indeed – this is a time of reckoning that won’t be soon forgotten.