As more and more people emerge from months of Covid-19 quarantine, I hear much talk from any number of writers and pundits about how a year of living in a pandemic has changed them.  Many of these intuitions of changes have to do with how people now view their loved ones.  To a person, people vow that, going forth, they will spend more time with their parents or children.

     While I heartily applaud these sentiments, I offer two thoughts.  One, our newfound desire to devote more attention to our loved ones should remind us of the rather precarious state of our lives.  We are so busy living that we forget who allowed and enabled us to live in the first place.  We forget our roots.  We frequently live as if we are suspended between a voiceless beginning and a blank ending, striving desperately to fill the inbetween with meaning.  Surely, life should be more than this.

     Two, and this is not necessarily new, these thoughts should speak to us of how we tend to measure the meaningfulness of our existence.  As goal driven as many of us are, particularly in the West (and those nations seeking to emulate such), we define our lives on the basis what we accomplish in them.  This rings hollow.  Although we should indeed develop goals and ambitions, we do well to frame these in a larger picture.  What value are accomplishments if, outside of their inherent factuality, they are just one more display of human ingenuity--and nothing more?

     And then we're gone.  If nothing else, the pandemic has demonstrated that how we choose to see life determines what we will see in it.

     And what we see beyond it.