#wayforward #athirdway
My 8 year-old son bought this sweater for me with the help of one of his grandmas and this is where my story will always end.
I was thinking I would post a photo of me in my mask + N95 looking absolutely ragged because I've been sick. I caught Covid. Hindsight is always 20/20. Knowing what I know would I make the same choices?
I have no idea, help me walk through this. Talk therapy.
I recently looked at the death count in the United States, we have definitely had more deaths in 2020 than we did the year before but if this macro trend website is correct
We had been having a decline in death rates until about 2007-2008 (the housing market crash?) and it has been uptrending since taking us back to around 1975 levels. I've heard several years ago that the generation I was living through was the first generation to have die younger than our parents. What does that say about our country and where we are going? That said, we have much to mourn, there are lives gone too soon because we couldn't hear the truth through all the noise.
How do we move forward from here?
I'm still testing my child fairly regularly, more so this last week because of recent known exposure. That may be practical going forward but definitely not regular testing just because, that is not a strategy going forward.
I have symptoms, I feel ill, staying home is reasonable. The question I want answers to are have we learned anything these last two years? Can we grow from what we've learned? Who is asking these questions? Are we asking this question of ourselves?
These last 2 years, I have had to quarantine with my son 2x and now isolate myself. I have definitely grown to love and appreciate the universality of masks because it makese sense to wear a mask when you are not feeling well and have a chance of sharing those not so fun germs with your friends or family. It makes sense to try to isolate a little so you don't get someone else sick when you feel like stink. Even if it is a mild cough and runny nose to you, it may not be for your neighbor. So all these years we insisted people show up at work regardless, our value was not placed on people, it was placed on product and productivity.
Time off - as much as many of us had had these last couple of years - unheard of. I am grateful I have a good job and one that has allowed for such generous time off but should we all not have that opportunity?
Yes fears of being taken advantage of, that someone is out there taking and not giving...
How do we develop and carefully curate that culture. I imagine, like anything else, it starts local. It doesn't hurt to have good policies and laws that support that and I imagine there are. I would also guess there are bad ones too.
So I hope as a nation we have learned that, to value each other and time and space we all currently share. I hope we can continue some of the things that work, nix the things that did, fix the things we broke, heal a nation, lend one another a hand.
#wayforward #athirdway
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