I wrote the bulk of this piece way back in 2021, a few months after COVID started exploding, and spent a few weeks tweaking things here and there, but I never really felt like it was quite finished. Then around a year ago, it popped back into my head; I made a few more tweaks, then just decided to record it. I don’t quite know why it took me this long to actually publish it, but finally, here it is.
Mind you, only the words and the voice are mine. The music bed is a beautiful piece called Waking Stars by Kai Engel from the Free Music Archive, and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License. And this specific post falls under that license as well. What does that mean? It’s all in the CC link above, but in simple terms, you can “copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format” as long as you (1) give appropriate credit, (2) don’t use it commercially, and (3) share any derivative work with the same license.
We’ve been living with this disease for a year and a half now, and we’re getting used to it… sorta. We’ve changed the way we work, how we interact, and how we behave around each other. And it almost seems like we’re going back to business as usual. But we’re not.
‘Coz let’s be frank here: we are still in crisis, and we are still stressed out. Many of us are facing some of the toughest challenges of our lives, and even if some of us have gotten past that, we are still recovering.
And I don’t just mean making up for lost revenue, or lost wages. All of us have lost that, but some have lost more. Some have closed down businesses they built from the ground up. Some have lost jobs they have had for years. And some – some have lost friends, family, loved ones.
We have all lost bits of ourselves over the past several months. We have all lost. And we are all working hard to rebuild, not just our businesses, but our lives. We’re struggling, and we need your support. We all need each others’ support.
So if you’re out, and you see that people seem detached, like they’re lost in their own worlds. Cut them some slack. They just might need some time to breathe, to think, to compose themselves. They might just be having a bad day – and more likely than not, they’ve probably had a bad few weeks not too long ago.
On the other hand, if people want to connect, want to interact with you, don’t brush them off too quickly. They might just want some human interaction – and that is a scarce commodity nowadays – something that even the most introverted among us could use more of. At the very least, acknowledge them and smile. And trust me, even under your masks, others can feel that smile.
I guess that’s really my point here. We’ve all been through some difficult things, and we’re all looking for our own ways to deal with the troubles facing us. And the best way that we can help each other is to be good to each other.
Be kind. Be compassionate. Be human.