In sitting down to reflect for this entry, I realized in a moment that I’m not so sure I’ve truly had an original thought in about a year. Maybe this is relatable (I hope for your sake, reader, not), but all that swirled around in my all-too-smooth brain were my previous Consider This reflections, and all that has (and hasn’t) changed since. In the spirit of doing less (which you should try some time, by the way), this entry ended up being a rehashing—or, more kindly, revisiting—of those thoughts.
Last year, I wrote a couple times about the profoundly paradoxical feeling—or state of mind, or moment—that we found ourselves moving through together as a university, a community, affected by the onset of the pandemic. I recall the surreal feelings ushered in by the precautions we’ve since had to follow, the distancing (both social and otherwise) that this required of us, the straining of any activity against a new, ever-present, ever-shifting calculation of risk and reward. It shook even our most basic, innocuous understandings of how to go about a “normal” day, whatever that meant; how each of us could accomplish what we set out to do here at Yale, if at all; how we could connect with each other and form, let alone maintain, a sense of belonging—in short, how we all “do” Yale. It felt challenging enough just to be, let alone to do.
Though that surreal existential undercurrent hasn’t exactly disappeared (nor, perhaps, should it), it has certainly abated thanks in no small part to our collective efforts. We’ve been aided by our impressive rates of vaccination, by the ongoing updates made to safety protocols from our amazing health & safety leaders, by continued regular testing and social distancing, along with a fair amount of trust and hope in equal measure to hold it all together. It’s easy now, or at least easier, to see a window of opportunity to reconstruct that “doing” Yale once more, however transformed that will become in this new, different moment.
We are now back on campus in-person, seeing faces and hearing voices long-missed once again, carefully reassembling the experiences that at this point only some of us can even remember. Yet still, I find myself holding on to the that same nagging I recognize having first met a little over a year ago, that persistent, bizarre tinge to the colors and ring to the sounds and feeling in the air: Isn’t this all still pretty weird?