Surviving The PanDAMNic
It’s hard to believe, but this month marked the one-year anniversary of the beginning of what has easily been the strangest year of our collective lives.
It was a year ago last March that our pre-pandemic world suddenly came to a screeching halt, without warning, with no playbook for how to endure a once in a generation crisis that would bring us all to our knees, while testing the limits of our fortitude and resolve.
And as the weeks and months passed, the pandemic dragged on, lock-down continued, while positive COVID cases and the death toll continued to soar, and we couldn’t help but feel defeated, excruciatingly numb to the surreal reality playing out all around us.
The “new normal” you would hear people say, but there proved to be nothing normal about the staggering, unacceptable numbers of people losing their lives to COVID-19, nothing normal about the people in our community, our friends and neighbors, who are still struggling to find enough food to eat, enough money to pay their mortgage or rent.
It has been a year – an entire year – already.
I have talked about returning to some semblance of normalcy before, but it was more hopeful optimism than some declarative statement firmly grounded in belief.
This is of course understandable, with everything that we have been through. This kind of prolonged trauma tends to wear you down, chew you up and spit you out, before you even realize that you’ve become complacent in the presence of the very beast, oblivious to the danger that’s been stalking your every movement.
I would like to say that our family has been lucky, that despite everything that has happened, we’ve gotten through all of this relatively unscathed. I wish I could say that we didn’t have to endure the loss of a loved one, or support a friend who lost someone close to them, but I can’t say that, not anymore.
I was of course optimistic, even hopeful, when they started the vaccine roll-out earlier this year, and definitely relieved when my wife, who is a nurse that provides direct patient care, was finally able to get fully vaccinated – a promising development no doubt, another important step forward and out of this thick, enveloping fog.
Earlier this month the schools where our boys attend offered the option for some students to return to in-person learning, another hopeful sign, and I’m sure a welcome change for many. But for us, our kids had been doing okay with remote learning, so we ultimately decided that it just wasn’t worth the risk of sending them back and possibly having them get exposed and unknowingly bring the virus into our home. This was especially concerning to me, since my health issues stem from an auto-immune disorder, and I was still waiting in the cue to receive my first vaccine shot. So, we continued with remote learning, and like everything else, made the best of a less than ideal situation.
Around that same time, my son Ryan started back up with lacrosse. Sure, it’s different, the players and coaches all have to wear masks, in addition to adhering to the other standard COVID protocols, but the important thing is that they are playing, they’ve found a way to play on.
And like every other facet of this crazy pandemic, I’m continuing to find new and different ways to adapt Accessiversity and the value-added services we are able to provide to ensure that our efforts have maximum impact in this changed business environment.
This past month I received the first shipment of some promotional Accessiversity t-shirts that will help us to spread our message and brand. I continue to push the boundaries of technologies like Zoom and Otter AI to offer interactive test sessions, and soon I will be introducing our Accessiversity tutorial video series and launching our new YouTube channel.
Chris Knapp wearing a black customized t-shirt with the Accessiversity logo.
And while some promotional t-shirts and tutorial videos might not rise to the level of other, transformative technological breakthroughs, to me and Accessiversity, they are significant. Simply put, these things represent progress, and in a year of constantly having to wade upstream through a torrent of the worst, most unimaginable crap, any step forward is better than getting pulled under, or swept away with the current.
Now, it's March, so I would be remiss if I didn’t at least make one March Madness reference. And yes, 2021 was better than 2020 in the simple fact that this year’s NCAA tournament didn’t get canceled, so my buddy Matt and I were able to resume our annual tradition of going up to his place in Pentwater to binge watch the opening weekend of the tournament. And before you judge, Matt has been fully vaccinated, and I had been self-isolating at home for the past month, so we felt reasonably safe hanging out together, just the two of us. Still, we tried to be smart about everything – we placed another Shipped order from the Ludington Meijer, opting for frozen foods and pre-packaged snacks versus going out to eat, grabbing grinders from Mancino’s or stopping into the Brown Bear for a cold, draft beer and signature ½ pound Cub burger.
And of course, the tournament was itself different this year, with all of the games being played in the state of Indiana, with only limited crowds, and an altered schedule which meant that Matt and I spent Thursday watching the four play-in games instead of the twelve to thirteen hours of non-stop basketball action that we have grown accustomed to. But, I digress…
Whether you root for MSU or U of M, once the tournament starts, most of us put our allegiance aside to cheer on all of the Big Ten teams. Well, 2021 was not exactly a banner year for the Big Ten teams, and as someone who picked three Big Ten teams to make it to the Final Four on my bracket, that is a bitter pill to swallow.
As I write this, Michigan is the one remaining Big Ten team still alive in the tournament, having earned their spot in the Elite 8, defying the odds to continue advancing without their best player Isaiah Livers. I don’t know how they have managed to do it, but they just keep mustering up something from deep inside to find a way to will themselves to win.
I don’t know how much longer Michigan will be able to sustain this run in the tournament. I don’t know how much longer this pandemic will last. Like the basketball team trying to advance, I guess willpower will have something to say about how we move forward from here.
Last week I received my first dose of the Moderna vaccine and will be getting my second shot on April 24.
Progress.
Maybe we’ll never return to normal, at least the normal that we had known, maybe that’s what people meant by the new normal, that it's not normal at all.
Maybe the new normal means that you move on as best you can – weary, scared, everybody battling on when nobody is one hundred percent – but more determined than ever to see your way through, adapt and overcome, to survive, to live to play another day.
We do what we can, and hopefully we march on.