Image © Jose & MidJourney
I spent some time in NYC this past week, a professional get together. Suddenly I saw myself in the midst of thousands of people, the organization said > 10,000, bumping against each other, avoiding booths and balloons in a maze that, along with some of the other empty corridors of the hotel, reminded me of The Shinning. The three floors of the event were loud, bright (it was a lighting event) and demanding every ounce of one’s attention, a stress tests to all our senses, perhaps less the taste one (food was not that interesting, and visually unpleasant in plastic boxes).
But you know what was on my mind, and perhaps on many other’s, what a great place to get a virus. And as this hit me, so did the recognition that life will never be the same after what we all went through since 2019, and it’s really a shame. Yes, I did plenty of these events in my life, equally filled to the brim with people, In Paris, in Milan, in Frankfurt, in Guangzhou, some here in the US. Some were so busy that organizations designed resting places, with airbeds and dimmed lighting so people could recover. In some, we could not even see what was happening, we had to wait till specific times to go back and actually see a booth. Miles and miles of booths, lines of people being transported via stairways and buses, activity stretching from early morning to past midnight, inside the event area and throughout cities, in their clogged sidewalks and canals. But I never thought, or remember thinking, what a great place to get a virus. I did probably get sick from attending some of them, from traveling on planes, from eating and drinking too much, but it never made me pause for a minute and think of being sick, knowing it could happen. So, what has changed?
I didn’t do too bad through the ordeal, under the circumstances and comparing to others. I did the first batch of vaccines, and then have had knowingly four times the dastardly virus that I am avoiding naming, or one of its variations. Knowingly because I might have missed a couple of times when I just treated the whole thing as a cold. I have no issues using masks whenever I want to protect others, and myself. And no, I will not engage in a scientific or political debate about the whole topic. This whole episode led me to simply acknowledge that, thought I wasn’t even one of the most traumatized in this ordeal, I still caught myself thinking the way I did. And the thought that crosses the mind infects and impacts the body, the behavior, the attitude, in ways that I can’t put my finger on, but I bet it does. It might be a look we give to a group of people clogging the corridor, or a hand gesture covering the nose, or a faster pace on certain places, but I have a feeling that this affected me, and us, and will do so for a long time. And it’s a shame, because if you love people the way I do, bumping into them, eye to eye with a smile, an exchange of words, a simple hug or a handshake, having this type of thought popping in your mind is really annoying, and almost makes you want to do just the opposite, head towards that large dense crowd of people, down that corridor full of people, basically a feeling of “getting back on the horse”. And maybe, if you can’t control what pops up into your mind, you can what you do about it.