A Time of Transition
and a space to embrace it
The past few years have been…weird. The world stopped for a while, and now we’re reckoning with a return-to-normal that never quite feels normal.
There’s been a lot of discussion about which demographics were hit the hardest by the time vacuum1 that was 2020 - 2022. Kids, certainly, missed out on important developmental milestones. Teens went from sophomores in high school to college freshman seemingly overnight. College students and emerging adults missed out on the fun, carefree times of early adulthood, and found themselves staring down a quarter-life crisis with no warning. Some people woke up to find themselves facing middle age without warning. Older adults were suddenly navigating a new work culture and economy a few years before retirement — if retirement could even be feasible. Then there are people like my grandparents, who spent some of their last healthy years in isolation, only to come out of the pandemic into a new isolation as their health declines.
And my demographic wasn’t spared, either. Friendships change when some people start having children and their peers don’t, and when formerly single friends become couples. But when those milestones happened during COVID, and your formerly childless friends emerge as parents of toddlers, the path to reuniting is rockier still.
It’s not a contest. It doesn’t matter who missed more of their formative years — all of our years are formative. To be human is to be constantly growing, learning, and evolving. Instead, we’ve been wandering.
And it feels like we’re wandering still. So many of us are confused about what direction we should take. Are our hopes from pre-2020 still our hopes? Where and how do we fit into a larger society filled with discord, division, and dysfunction? What’s our path in the new cultures that are forming from the lessons we learned or refused to learn from the pandemic?
This week was the Jewish holiday Sukkot, a celebration of wandering. Of transitions. We remember our people’s wandering in the desert, and the protection God afforded us as we navigated that deeply scary transition from slavery to freedom, from an extended family without real structure to a nation with a distinct identity, regimens, and rituals. One of the primary ways we mark this holiday is by rejoicing; it’s literally a commandment to be happy during this time. And I think — whether you’ve never heard of Sukkot before today, or you’ve chosen not to celebrate, or you’ve been meticulously following all the rituals for your entire life — this idea of finding happiness in a time of transition is something we can all use right about now.
The holiday ends this weekend, with Shemini Atzeret, which itself is a day of transition. It’s one last hurrah to mark the end of the holiday season, and unlike the rest of the Jewish holidays, it serves no other purpose than to pause in joy. The holiday acknowledges that it’s not so easy to go back to the mundaneness of regular life with the snap of a finger, but rather, that it takes time to ease back to normal.
Whether you’re Jewish or not, I think we’re all in a little bit of a Shemini Atzeret phase right now, in that moment before things are truly normal. But let’s celebrate our ability to feel discomfort. Let’s enjoy the journey even if the destination is not what we expected when we set out. Let’s rejoice that we’re all in this together.
I’m writing only about the social effects of COVID, not the deaths or long-term medical issues.