It didn’t used to be like this. Now, I cry.
I wondered, sometimes, what was wrong with me, that I didn’t break down. That was some distant years ago now.
Now, it doesn’t take much.
The sound of a wooden spoon banging on an empty spaghetti pot. The delirious, lovely cacophony of hundreds, maybe thousands of spoons or forks banging pots, wine bottles, coffee cans, lids clanging, hands clapping, shouting unabashed hoots and howls and whistles of crowd support, through open windows, from balconies, fire escape landings, and roof tops, to the streets below, as first responders, healthcare givers, and all the varied essential services providers process home or to work during shift changes.
The videos of early evening celebrations, blue light festivals, and raucous home-based shows of support in cities across the country, around the world, of exuberance that can raise the rafters, focused on those our society have deemed essential reduce me to tears. This situation, this moment, this life makes magic out of misery.
So, too, my physician wife’s account of the way doctors, nurses, hospital staff stop in their tracks amidst whatever they’re doing, to applaud as a recovered Covid-19 patient gets wheeled from the intensive care unit–where he or she has been on a ventilator for the better part of two or three weeks–to go home to loved ones, one of those who recovered.
So, too, does word from one of my team members–whose spouse strives each day to find housing for one of Los Angeles’s 60,000 or so people who’re living in boxes, old tents, cars, on the city sidewalks–that, thanks to his efforts through the pandemic, a blind man now has a safe, decent, healthy place to sleep.
Emotion erupts where in the past such phenomena may have been of interest, but never found their way so directly to such a deep and roiling well of unmanageable feeling. Now they do.
We have the Middle English word crisis for times like this. Its root meaning is this: “a vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse,” from Latinized form of Greek krisis “turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death.”
Crisis, literally life or death, is where we are. Hopefully, now, we’re entering the beginning of the end period of the worst damage of the novel coronovirus outbreak, whether it’s that social distancing and lockdown measures have “flattened the curve” or that the virus itself has blown through the population and taken most of its toll by now.
The full brunt of the crisis now hovers menacingly over livelihoods, work, the ability of households to make their way as microcosmic economic engines. Households and small businesses are, in effect, mostly on a 30, 60, 90, or at most a 6-month timeline, within which their fate will turn “either better or worse.”
Join us today at 5 pm EDT, at #BuildersAreEssential, where we’ll offer a “Cash Crash Course,” on building business survival tactics for the liquidity crisis.
Just as we celebrate the work of essential healthcare givers doing their jobs as the public health crisis tore through our towns and cities, and just as we feel a powerful surge of joy and relief when a Covid patient comes successfully off life support as if reborn, and just as we cheer the moment a blind homeless individual secures the sanctuary of decent shelter, now the crisis–the moment of truth where “change must come, for better or worse,” for all things to do with livelihoods, work.
Every time a builder clocks in or out from a job, every successfully delivered truckload of building materials, every pulse, and node, and transaction, and point of value creation in the investment, planning, design, development, construction, finish, and settlement cycle of building should now be recognized for its essential nature.
Not just to safely, sustainably, healthfully built space. But to work itself. We will be here, hopefully to help, to inform, and to spread the word of your success as a new recovery takes shape over the months to come.
