You may be simply trying to survive this time.
Survive till the election — and hope that the election is decided on election night or soon thereafter.
Survive till interview invites come out — and hope that you’re among the select few who receive one.
Literally survive, as in, wearing your mask (please please please wear your mask) and staying safe and not going out to bars, and trying not to get this virus, and not to pass it to others.
Survive to the weekend.
Survive to the end of 2020.
Hopefully you have not personally been affected by the tragedy that has come to so many families, where coronavirus has claimed a life. Hopefully for you, the closest it’s come is in the news, where they talk about the numbers, and you have not had the experience of losing someone. If you had, our hearts go out.
This year has been stressful for everybody — in ways that most of us have never been stressed. If you have an intense job that’s not let up with any slack in the pandemic, and you’ve been working long days and hard hours to get everything in your life done, then you’ve been trying to survive in difficult, possibly high-pressure conditions. The days are likely a blur.
If you’ve been furloughed or waylaid in some way due to coronavirus, maybe even subject to a quarantine that’s kept you home with nothing to do, then for you also, the days are likely a blur.
For many of us, we’re just trying to get through to the end of this whatever-it-is that we’re in, this multifactorial siege of pressures from all sides, hoping there’s an end in sight at some point soon.
So far, it’s been pretty unrelenting. This year has been unlike any other that any of us has experienced.
You may be eager for it to be over.
And yet…
It is in this moment that you are actually living your life. Under whatever circumstances that you’re dealing, you’re still doing OK. You’re in enough health, with enough wealth, and enough opportunity, that you’re here reading a blahg about how to get in for an MBA. Looking at that with proper perspective, then things have to be at least kinda sorta OK.
Even though this year feels endless, and even though it’s almost hard to remember what things were like pre-covid, and even though you may think back on who you were and what you were doing at this time last year with a sense of wistfulness or melancholy or nostalgia, as if those were the Olden Times, the reality is that this moment will eventually pass. At some point, society will return to standard functioning, where people can congregate safely and not be at risk for acquiring a deadly decision. Where concerts and football games and airplanes are all a standard part of everyday life once again.
At this moment, in late October 2020, there’s a particular experience you’re having, a way that perception is being filtered through your consciousness into your mind, colored and flavored by the external world. This experience is unique. It probably has gone unquestioned for you before this very moment, where you’re reading these words. However, there is an essential nature to this moment in time, this amalgamation of perception, created by the unique confluence of events that we are all living through right now. There is a tone or a vibe that is associated with right now — a feeling, and this feeling is transient.
There will come a time in the future, perhaps not even that far off in the future, when things will resume a tempo that more closely resembles the Before Age. When life takes on a routine, where you get back on the conveyor belt and you’re carried forward with momentum without even thinking much about it.
Instead of this stalled-out experience, this waiting room place, that many of us are currently existing in.
This waiting-room place probably feels like a bad place, like a stagnant place, like a place that we’re all sick of and just want to be done with. That feeling is legit. There is good reason to want all of this to be over.
And yet.
There is also something happening right here, right now.
Take you, for example. You’ve decided not to let the circumstances of life hold you back. You’ve decided to go for it, to seek out more education, to get into a great school and see where that can take you.
This moment in time, this is worth something. It’s not a time simply to be survived.
There’s a feeling to what’s happening to all of us — an un-nameable sense to it, that’s there and available if you tap into it. There’s an opportunity in this time, something that can be leveraged, an unknowable knowing, perhaps. Consider inviting it in, seeing what it’s about. It will be gone, very very soon, it will be gone. Life will resume what it had been before — not in the same way, but the routines will come back, the stifling routines, the boredom, the drear.
What will you make of this moment? What will you remember of this time when it’s passed?
Tell us what you think.