Re-entry into the world. As I sit here with the sun coming up and the window open a crack, letting spring sneak in just a little bit, in the distance I can hear the whirr of traffic, it's the light hum of cars on the expressway. It was one year ago the world started to slow down. Albeit an abrupt stop, but it's like the world took one long breath, that deep inhale and that long exhale. We slowed down. We turned our lights green. We painted pictures. We hung them for our neighbors to see. We were in this together. We saw humankind be just that, kind humans. We came together at different times throughout the day for various reasons. It may have been incident command at work, it may have been a press conference from New York, it may have been the daily update from our governor. We came together. We learned what zoom was. We reached out to friends like we hadn't in a long, long time. The air became cleaner, the pace became slower, the walks became longer, and we appreciated the little things so much more.
When the rover landed on Mars I believe they coined it as seven minutes of terror. When I hear reentry, I think about space travel and that point of reentry in the atmosphere. This is part of the space travel journey the engineers and astronauts put the most thought into. Between the deceleration and the heat and the correct angel and the gravity and the friction - how do we bring this shuttle and humans back into Earth's atmosphere without blowing up? What about our reentry into the world? How do we thoughtfully re-enter into the world? Now I realize a lot of us never left the Earth's atmosphere, your world kept spinning and life carried on. For those of us that took that collective deep breath, how do we do that again, but just the other way?
There was a definite introvert advantage when it came to lockdown, so this definitely isn't going to be an easy process for everyone. Let's put some thought into our reentry plan and let's try and do it with a lot of grace. We may need to get the speed and trajectory just right and this may not look the same for everyone.
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