Just like that, the ground has shifted under our feet. Things are “falling apart.” It is easy to seek people to blame. It is easy to seek a narrative that makes sense of it all.
Yet the unraveling is just beginning; it is too soon to ask questions whose answers are yet to be revealed and understood. We do not know how many of us will die. We do not know the economic outcome. We do not know what relief packages our political leaders will pass into law. We do not know what miracle cures will be discovered. We do not know.
But who we are right now, in this falling apart of things, will shape what is to come. Each one of us is more powerful than we ever could have imagined. The thoughts we entertain, the use of our imaginations to build apocalypse or utopia, the capacity of our creativity to build something new out of the ashes of our failures, our choices to hoard or to share, to withdraw or to reach out, to break down or to break open….these are already determining what will be and how we will live into it.
We are falling apart together, but we are also laying the foundation for what will come.
Someday history will put all of this in context; it will weave together the causes and the outcome of these times and tell posterity how we did. What will it write about us?