Nothing lasts forever. There will be a day when things go back to “normal.” It will be a different normal than we knew it to be, but isn’t that always the case with change in our lives?
How many hardships has each of us been through in our lives? How many times have we felt like failures? How many times have we gotten our hearts broken? How many times have we mourned the loss of someone we love? In those moments, how agonizing was the pain? How scared were we? In the deepest parts of those moments, we couldn’t imagine how we would ever feel ok again. We couldn’t imagine laughing again. Loving again. Trying again.
But we did. Because nothing lasts forever, except for one thing: our resilient spirit.
Things feel scary right now. Each day we wake up wondering how this became our reality. Everything was fine just a few months ago. We yearn to sit in a coffee shop working on our laptops or talking to an old friend. Music playing around us and people bustling around. When has anyone ever wanted to go to their gym so badly as in this moment? Just to see familiar faces and share in the common push of a workout. There are people we want to see in other states and countries that feel eternities away right now. What if my parents get it? Parents think, what if my kids get it? The husband thinks about his wife. Siblings and friends all worry for one other.
Will things ever feel normal again? Are we going to have to wear masks and not see each other’s faces forever? Will we hang out in restaurants, movie theaters, and coffee shops with masks? Or at all? What about concerts? What will weddings look like? There are so many things we are thinking about.
We feel scared, heartbroken and mournful. But we have felt these feelings before. And we emerged. And we’ll do it again. We will go outside again. We will gather together again to celebrate things and have fun. Maybe it will look different than it did before. But hasn’t every stage in our life looked different? Imagine the kids growing up right now who are too young to know the difference. Imagine those of us who are too young to know the difference between before WW2 and after. We’ve lived obliviously to those events, yet we live in a world shaped by them.
It’s hard to see how this will end. Or imagine how things will feel “normal” again. But they will. We will adjust and adapt, and we will emerge from this surreal and crazy time. Our resilient spirit and instincts to survive don’t know any other way.
