Respite

I'm thinking this morning about a couple of lines from an old James Taylor song I love so much, they're all the words I ever learned of it, "whenever I see your smiling face, I have to smile myself, Because I love you." 

As someone whose personality led me to social-distancing decades before it was life-sustaining or required and whose looks were vastly improved by donning a face mask, and who was encouraged by numerous a fitted brown paper bag for my entire head (eyeholes optional, apparently), I'm still delighted that we are a big step closer to what I recall of our lives pre-COVID-19, even if my memory of before is all I'll ever have again. 

I don't have to stand at the Marina where the Yantic and Shetucket Rivers meet to form Norwich Harbor and the Thames River to be reminded that no one steps into the same river twice because both they and the river have changed. Change is neither good nor bad; it just is. What we make of change and how we react to it is what gives it a positive or negative value.  

Remember where we were on April 20, 2020, when by executive order, Governor Ned Lamont directed the covering of mouths and noses (face masking) and distancing when we shared public spaces? Last week, responding to new guidance and recommendations from the Center for Disease Control, CDC, Lamot announced that, as of midnight today, he was ending those restrictions for fully vaccinated residents.   

In light of all those pandemic pounds I've added over the last thirteen or so months, I'm hoping he's not considering reinstating a requirement for trousers rather than sweatpants while out and about because I'm not sure anyone else is ready to see what that looks like in my case.

I think we who have reached this point should allow ourselves a long collective sigh of relief as we continue to make progress on the promise we made to one another to build ourselves, city, state, and nation back better than it was. We don't have to be great to start but we have to start to be great and today's as good a day to do that as we've had.

You don't need me to remind you we should not celebrate today as the conquest of COVID. There's too much disease and death still in our country and across the world to not continue to be steadfast and vigilant (and careful and protective) of ourselves and one another. 

So many of us are exhausted from the effort and exertion (emotional, intellectual, physical, financial, spiritual) it has taken to stay on the path we are own as we struggled to keep our own tiny boat of loved ones, friends, and family from being swamped by the crushing rush of COVID-19 and associated circumstances. 

Now is the moment for all of us to remember the mantra from the pandemic's earliest days, #AloneTogether, and realize while we were very much in our own boat, we also shared an ocean. Many of us know or are themselves, someone, who lost a person in this plague. Those of us who didn't need to keep you in our thoughts as you hold those departed in your hearts. 

Today, we should remember we can face anything and as of today, we can share our whole faces with one another. So if you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.
Don't worry; they'll pass it on.
-bill kenny