by Liz Covey, LMHC

I’m anything but a historian, but this whopper of a year has me thinking like one. I find myself pondering what it means to have lived through 2020, a year that was full of so much and also so little. A year so unique that it will be talked about for decades to come, if not forever, just as we swap stories about where we were when the Towers fell or when Kennedy was shot. But however alike in terms of before-and-after comparisons, those events were mere instances, specific moments in time. Questions to which there is a simple answer.

What about the momentous phenomena that occurs over a long period of time? The flash points of history that seem to unfold in slow-motion, or more accurately, in regular motion — that which occurs at the pace of day to day life? What do we make of events that happen amidst the laundry and the bill paying and which will span enough time for some to have two birthdays come and go? 

The kind of experience that allows one to answer the where were you question is distinctly different from the one that asks how. How were you the year that everything happened, beauty and terror, to loosely quote Rilke.