Introducing the Virtual Pandemic Time Capsule
The potentially wonderful news Monday that a Covid-19 vaccine could be coming as soon as later this year, with widespread (if awfully complicated!) deployment as early as spring, served as a reminder of a mantra we all told ourselves at the beginning of the pandemic but have largely forgotten in the madness of 2020: This will all end someday. Time may have seemed like it stopped back in March and will never re-start again, but it, in fact, will. You will hug your extended family again. You will go to dinner parties where you meet people you didn’t know beforehand again. You will sit shoulder-to-shoulder with your fellow fans at a football game again. That did not all just go away forever. It’s going to happen again. And it may happen sooner than we might have thought.
Which means that someday, we’re all going to look back at this year, this pandemic, this incredible time, as something that is over. It will be a sad time, full of loss and pain and regret, but as the years go by, the curiosities and peculiarities of the age will fade and become relics … artifacts of a time only partly remembered. We might not look back at all this and chuckle, like remembering when everyone wore Hammer pants. But we will look back and shake our heads, at what we had to live through and what we had to embrace to do so.
