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| Keep away, please London, ON March 2020 This photo originally shared on Instagram |
I stood over this sticker that had been stuck to the floor in the vegetable aisle of our nearly empty local grocery yesterday for an inordinately long time, pondering this very question.
I was musing about how quickly the visuals of our day-to-day lives had changed: Separation stickers on floors, sneeze guards on cashier checkout stands, the inevitable dance of distance as two dog-walkers approach each other at an intersection.
It seems somewhat disrespectful to even think about it - here I am, pondering the meaning of stickers while hundreds of thousands of people are fighting for their lives, and for the lives of others. But it's difficult to ignore how profoundly this event has already altered the planet and shifted how we live.
Long after the story fades from the top of the news cycle, I suspect we'll be living with the permanently altered landscape of a society that's far more aware of the dangers of invisible pathogens - and the limits of what we thought was once invulnerable medical technology.
We hear politicians speak about timelines for returning to something approaching normal, yet I wonder what "normal" even is, and whether or not that's even something we should be holding out there for ourselves, like a giant carrot at the end of a very long stick.
Normal didn't exist before reports started emerging of this mysterious new illness, and it doesn't exist now. The world has changed, there's no going back, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just the way life plays out, and change is simply how we live.
Sometimes, it looks like this, is all.
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