Look back, look forth, look close, there may be more prosperous times, more intelligent times, more spiritual times, more magical times, and more happy times, but this one, this small moment in the history of the universe, this is ours.
And let’s do everything with it. Everything.
– Jean Paul Sartre in a letter to Simone de Beauvoir
As we approach the end of the year, I feel it bearing down on me that 2022 will soon be gone. Whatever I wished to get done and didn’t will still be hanging there. But it will be 2023, and 2022 will be gone, never to be lived again, alive only in memory. One more year of my life will be in the past.
Often at year’s end I hear a lot of “goodbye and good riddance” about the year that’s ending. It seems that there’s always a lot of grousing about what a bad year it was. I can’t do that. Maybe 2022 hasn’t been the greatest year. I don’t know. But I feel fondly toward this year as it comes to a close. To me, 2022 was the year we got our mobility back.
During the first news reports about Covid, I heard experts on epidemiology say that a worldwide pandemic, such as the flu epidemic of 1918, has a life cycle of three years. The idea that Covid could be around for so long was inconceivable to me then.
But it came true. The thing has hung around a long time, and is still not gone. But I see 2022 as the year we finally freed ourselves from its tyranny. That is something really worth celebrating.
So quickly we begin to take our good fortune for granted, but if I recall March of 2020, I cannot take lightly the fact that we have regained our mobility. Our civilization is no longer in bondage to this viral storm. Such things don’t happen overnight. I don’t know exactly when we crossed the threshold, but by looking back, we can see how far we have come.
Although 2022 started roughly, with a resurgence of Covid via the Omicron variant, it was ultimately the year the barriers came down. The CDC stopped pre-departure mandatory testing for flights into the US, so people traveling overseas didn’t have to fear being unable to return home. Given time, the vaccinations proved to be highly effective. The number of new cases went into a steady downward trend, so most countries reached the point where they could safely drop entry requirements such as proof of vaccination, Covid test results, and so on.
Once the fences were down and it appeared to be safe, people were free to travel. And they did, with a…
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