The collective emotional roller coaster our homes, communities, states, nations and world have experience over the past week cannot be quantified with words.
But damn if it’s not like me to try. Leave it to a pandemic for me to sit down and type my first entry in so long I cannot recall.
The world around us moved so fast last Wednesday that it seemed unreal. The NBA was suspending its season?
Huh.
Thursday saw universities shuttered, college basketball conference tournaments cancelled, high schools move to eLearning.
Um, what?
Friday felt like the bottom fell out, the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament, a new kind of March Madness. Spring sports cancelled – including the College World Series in June – throwing eligibility questions and team rosters for the 2020-21 season into a quagmire that didn’t feel so giggity giggity.
And we thought the news was all filled with doom and gloom before?
I told my wife Friday afternoon that my brain hurt. I couldn’t comprehend much more that day, think of any more angles to cover or next steps after the next steps. I needed wine tequila and a hoodie.
2020 will be forever remembered as when “Social Distancing” became apart of the American lexicon, when everyone from the age of two to 92 could recite proper hand washing protocols.
It will be remembered when we learned everything in our economy is connected, that an essential freeze halted us in our tracks. We quarantined, we worked from home. We overreacted, we under-reacted.
We hoarded toilet paper.
Everything has effectively been put on hold. Youth sports, book clubs. Going out to dinner, a family cookout with grandparents. Spring break. Every Disney Park closed for weeks, every zoo and museum closed. No choir concerts, no parades, no church in person, no events really of any kind.
Everything. Has. Stopped.
But have we learned?
Nothing we didn’t already know.
That faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us, and while the greatest is love, the most important might be hope.
We need to hope we can get back to normal before July. Before June.
We’re holding out hope for high school baseball in our home state. My son, a senior, is a part of a team that won a state championship last season. His friends from his travel teams, scattered across the state, all want the chance to play before college. Most won’t get a chance to play in college, but it is not about that specifically.
It’s about Senior Night. It’s about Prom. It’s about hearing your name called for the final time. Crossing the stage with a diploma at graduation and graduation parties of definitely more than 10 people.
It’s about all we’ve taken for granted. The commute to work filled with podcasts that have fresh content about sports, movies, politics, whatever. Seeing our co-workers, sitting face-to-face in meetings, teaching in a classroom filled with people.
It’s been merely a week, and even the introverts like me don’t think we really understood how significant social distancing could be to the fabric of what it is to be American.
Maybe this is a chance to re-learn, to re-think the daily life and throw our routines out of whack. Are we adaptable? Are we unbeatable? Can we turn a negative, a 100 negatives, into a positive? Are we just catch phrases, or can we rise to the challenge and endure?
We’re always taking about how busy we are (I’m looking at, well, all of us).
Well, how about now? Time to read. Time to listen. Time to think. To take a walk. To get to know our spouses and kids again. To find a way to serve a purpose greater than ourselves.
Maybe this is our wake-up call.
What is truly important, and what is not.
Sure, we’ve clung tight to family. Personally, we haven’t turned into The Shining family around here…yet. And we appreciate our home, our jobs, our friends and our freedoms.
But hope, man.
Hope might be the most fascinatingly human emotion there has ever been. And we need it more than ever.
No matter your beliefs, your political allegiances, whether you call this a hoax or are digging your doomsday bunker as I type, this is history happening for better of worse in real time.
It is a stark reminder we are not in control, not even a little bit, not even at all. But like any good book or movie (that we’ve all probably re-watched or re-read three times by now), hope is a good thing.
It could be the hope we’ll stop losing our ever-loving minds. Hope that those who aren’t taking it serious will wake up to the fact that COVID-19 is a bit more threatening than we thought a week ago, or even a day ago.
Hope is why Hallmark is running Christmas movies in March. It’s why Disney+ put Frozen II up months before they were supposed to. It is why classic sports re-runs are a welcome distraction. Why Tom Brady going to Tampa Bay and leaving New England was something else to talk about for a few hours.
Because we do not know where this going. We do not know the impact on the economy, on our jobs, on our daily lives yet. And we won’t fully for some time.
But we hope.
We hope for the sick, we hope for the cure, for strong leadership, for our friends, for our industries, for our kids.
We hope for an appreciation of the life we lived two weeks ago and for a future that might be close to it.
So, yes, we hope for baseball in this house. And we hold out that hope, because without it, well, it just makes the brain hurt.
Stay safe. Stay informed. Stay good to each other.
Stay hopeful.