"The rug was ripped out from underneath seven billion people at once. With personal plans in disarray, life as we knew it was thwarted by an emergency bigger than all of us. Gap year travel was cancelled. Weddings were off. Jobs were lost. Families were separated. People sheltered in place, and did it with varying degrees of comfort and physical and mental safety.
The pandemic schooled us in responding to uncertainty. It shook us from the fairytale that the rest of our lives stretch luxuriously before us, offering endless, unbroken opportunities to do all the things we want, whenever we feel like it.
The ‘better time’ we’re waiting for is not guaranteed. It never was. Many of us have been living in a state of ‘perpetual potential’ for years, shelving ideas, deferring plans, waiting til we feel ‘ready’ or until the kids are older, or we’ve lost weight or landed a better job.
We’re playing Russian roulette with our dreams. We’re assuming (based on a wing and a prayer) that when we’re finally ‘ready’, we’ll still be around and will have capacity to deliver on these plans.
If we’re middle aged, we’re banking on our health and strength and mobility holding out well into what we imagine might be the second half of our lives (but who knows?) And we just hope the world is ready for us by the time we’re in a better position to chase our dreams. Because it’s one thing to curtail our plans ourselves, but quite another to have our plans thrown into seemingly never-ending turmoil by forces beyond our control.
We did not sign up for this chaos!"
