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What’s needed today more than ever is a healthy sense of detachment. Not the kind that grants permission to “tune out” or seek distraction to the point of no longer being aware of the creeping threat to our democracy being posed by trumpism, but the type conditioned by perspective—the realization that, no matter how frightening or unsettling the news is these days, it isn’t the end of the world; we are not about to plunge into the abyss! Things, as they say, could be worse.

Perspective is “a true understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion.” https://www.bing.com/search?q=perspective+definition&qs=LS&pq=perspective&sk=LS1&sc=8-11&cvid=00F5D5F59CAE4CE5ADD9552733EB9A20&FORM=QBRE&sp=2&ghc=1

I think often of that long-ago day when, at eleven years of age, I sat atop the wall behind my parents’ house contemplating, to the best of an eleven-year-old’s ability, my place in the world. It was the first day of summer vacation, and my whole life lay before me like an open book, a story not yet written, full of endless possibility. My happiness was palpable; I was loved, my needs were taken care of, and my imagination felt no limits. At that moment, life seemed like it did the first time I heard the Beatles, the first time I tasted fresh-ground coffee, the first time I felt true love.

It was the kind of feeling one wishes one could experience over and over again, were only providence inclined to permit such unending joy.

And here I now find myself, in the second half of my eighth decade, contemplating once again my position in the world.

It feels odd to go from having your whole life ahead of you, with the perception of plenty of time to see and do the things you dream of, to the realization that, at this point in my life, much of that time is now largely behind me.

Thoughts of making new plans, launching new projects, are now overshadowed by the growing awareness of a significantly shortened shelf-life. This is not to infer that, being ever the optimist, such an observation should be allowed to discourage or otherwise dampen thoughts about the future. But my thinking these days is nonetheless informed through the realization that the odds are better than even at least some of the projects I envision finishing might not ever get completed.

But that’s alright. It’s part and parcel of the lot of those who’ve managed for whatever reason to escape an early demise. To borrow, uncharacteristically and with more than a modicum of discomfort, words uttered by my least favorite person in the world, our feckless president, “It is what it is.”

Certain advantages are bestowed to those who’ve joined the ranks in which I’ve now become a member, but in order to take full advantage of them one must possess a healthy sense of detachment.

A lot has happened since that eleven-year-old boy mused about the opportunities that once laid before him. The century of my birth has long since passed the torch, and a new millennium has taken its first baby-steps. For one to say those first steps have been faltering would be a gross understatement!

Not long after the last peal sounded from the bells that rang ushering in the new millennia, America experienced a tragedy unparalleled in its history, an event shocking in its daring and consequential in its import. In the aftermath of 911, the world was changed forever,

And now, with an epidemic threatening to eclipse that of the Great Pandemic of 1918, made unimaginably worse through the ineptitude of a fatally narcissistic president, the world is changing again! Where we will land amidst all this turmoil, if and when the virus ever passes, is tamed by science, or becomes “normalized” through herd immunity (translation: via eliminating the low-hanging fruit—the elderly, the immuno-compromised, the dark-skinned—people the president would almost certainly refer to as “losers”), is anyone’s guess.

But post-Covid America will not be like it was prior to the epidemic any more than the country was after 911. Or what resemblance I bear today to that eleven-year-old boy those many years ago.

In making adjustments to an ever-changing set of circumstances, it’s all a matter of perspective. And nothing aids one’s perspective better than a healthy sense of detachment.

Tim Konrad

6 September, 2020