Last Friday, the Yale and Princeton Glee Clubs got together for our first in-person joint concert since the start of the pandemic. After we warmed up backstage, a senior in the group gave a heartfelt “pep talk” in which he shared a fond memory from the Yale-Princeton concert in his first year—when he could not have imagined how drastically life would change just a few months later. In the early days of lockdown, he told himself that he would never again take the privilege of choral singing for granted.
Yet the fact that we say things have “returned to normal” proves that we take such things for granted. We long to take them for granted, just as we used to. There’s something comforting about it. But thanks to that senior’s pep talk, I went into our concert more determined to savor every moment—not as if it were our last, but as if it were abnormal and will always be so. Painful as it may be, the prospect of losing the most enriching parts of our lives is no longer a hypothetical. It happened. Now that it’s mostly over, give yourself permission to be grateful for those extraordinary ordinary things.