There have been many strange a horrible things about these last eighteen months of pandemic uncertainty, but one of the strangest (for this fellow, anyway) has been the abject inability to plan anything further out than a few weeks or maybe a month or two at a stretch.
“Meaning, the last eighteen months have been typified by a frustrating balancing act of risk vs. mental health.”
“I try to plan the coming months and come up short. How can I make a plan for October when the end of August is so unknowable.”
“For me, this re-centering of life around the now is novel. Pre-pandemic I was always six to eighteen months out, rarely in the moment. But now the now is all we can depend on.”
“One definition of being an adult might be: To divine hope from hard truths. The hard truth I’ve been operating under these last eighteen months has simply been: I don’t know, and neither does anyone else, really.”
We’ve been playing this game all summer, hoping to take a vacation, but watching cases creep and then shoot up, weighing new information come out about lowered vaccine efficacy, and feeling too unsure to book anything. We finally decided we need a break, and to use up some vacation hours, so we’re going to take a staycation in September 😔
