Here it comes

Do you feel it? The pace is faster now. An hour passes like it holds just 45 minutes again. There’s no time to schedule a [virtual] happy hour with a group of friends without reshuffling five other obligations to make it happen. To-do lists are longer. Tasks are piling up. Energy is low.

Are you feeling it too? Normal is almost back.

Schools are reopening. Dining out, while limited, is possible again. Events are being tentatively announced. Contracts are being funded. Businesses are hiring. Rush hour traffic is back to its normal morning roar — I listen to it from bed every morning now. Airport traffic is picking up too — I can hear the jet engines when I sit down for dinner.

Everyone is preparing for the overheated race to catch up on everything we missed during the pandemic year, and already, I can’t keep up.

I’m nostalgic for the empty streets, empty aisles and empty calendar of April 2020. I already miss the experience of genuine boredom — not the boredom that comes when entering the seventh hour of work on the third day of the workweek, drafting the same type of memo for the same type of client for the thousandth time. No, I miss the blessed boredom that reminds me how I used to play piano to fill the silence, how I used to read books for hours because I had literally nothing better to do.

Will we ever find balance? Or are we doomed to lurch forward at an ever-increasing velocity until nature stops us in our tracks? Even as the world wants to go back to who we were, can I reserve the right to stay behind, to embrace a slower pace, to shelter in place every so often even when there is nothing from which to hide except the relentless shove of normalcy?

We’ll find out soon enough.