Unless you’re a judge or a juror, taking both sides of anything isn’t an option. If you are not a judge or a juror, and can take or see both sides an issue in perfect balance, then you might just be Divine, having the gift of non-dual thinking.

In my youth, a lesson or two admonished me to remember that there were always two sides to a story. But in the case of COVID, only one of them matters to me. The side of COVID that’s changed my life, uprooted it and causes me to wonder if it will ever be the same again.

Just like pre-9/11when we didn’t have Nazi scrutiny before boarding a flight. Now, we do. We’re never going back. The once unthinkable became the new normal. And so it is again: being paced off in stores to shop. Dealing with scarcity. Major life events cancelled because of the virus. Travel opportunities abroad limited maybe for the rest of my lifetime.

I think of the pictures that won’t be taken, the laughs and congratulations that won’t be heard. The half-filled glass of life now seen as half-empty. The natural order of things is destroyed; unapologetically reformed. All I can do is watch from the inside.