Header image description: Background appears to be a blackboard, dusty with white chalk. There is a cube, a circle with several angles noted, several formulas, and various geometric shapes with angles, sine, and cosine marked.

photo credit: Gerd Altmann, via Pixabay.

It’s been.

I spent a fair amount of time in my mind, kicking around potential words to add to that phrase. To round it out, finish it off. Make it more robust. But I realized that anything I could do to alter it would degrade rather than enhance its profundity.

I know that I’m not alone in this. I know that, posed the same question—how’s it been going?— most of you might consider several possible answers, and then land on the very same one.

There’s no way to begin to process the past year in a thousand words or less, so I’m not even gonna try. Everything happened, all at once. After that, nothing happened. We knew that some things still had to happen, so we scurried about—mentally, if not physically— trying to figure out how to make those things happen, trying to imagine what shape things were supposed to take now that most of the shapes we had known during the Before Time were no longer permitted.

We somehow simultaneously contracted and stretched, contorting our lives to fit the new shapes as best we could, trying desperately to master the new geometry. Many of us complained, because this was, for us, restriction, it was compression; many of us rejoiced, because this was, for us, a freedom we had been begging for, and had been, until now, told was impossible.

For many of us, the After Time is on the horizon. I hope that, in our desire–and perhaps, our need–to put this past year and some months behind us, we allow the space for ourselves and for others to sit in all that it’s been, in whatever shape that takes.

Cuz, boy, has it been.