The emotion I want to convey right now is that of gratitude.
With everything that’s going on with the coronavirus, it’s easy to be caught up in the moment, become always reactive to things changing rapidly all around us. Days start blending in together, and you’re simply doing your best to find some semblance of normalcy, especially so in the earlier days of the current crisis, when you have no idea what new paradigm shift the next hour will bring. When you’re so busy trying to stay afloat, there’s no time to take a step back and look.
It was not until I start detaching from the situation and started to view things from on a macro level that I realize how lucky me and my family have been during this period of shelter-in-place. First and most important we are healthy and doing well physically, which is worth absolutely everything in these hazardous times. Secondly, our financial situation have remained very solid: my job allows me to work from home, and my dad who does general contracting hasn’t skipped a beat, because construction projects never really took a break.
Even the least fortunate of us - my brother - was lucky to get a month’s salary for March, and then filed for unemployment. Thanks to the generosity of the federal government in expanding the amount of unemployment insurance, it means he’ll be quite okay during this quarantine as well.
Indeed we are extremely lucky; there’s no other way to put it. Obviously I’m incredibly grateful that it turned out this way for us; I only need to go on twitter for a few moments to get a reminder that countless others haven’t got it so easy in this era of COVID-19. I hope to never take this for granted.
I am thankful for this little bugger too.