This has been on my mind a lot lately. The old world is gone.

Before you start to freak out, keep in mind: that’s true every day. Every day the world of yesterday is gone. Every second we are on a new earth; heck, we are new ourselves. We have lived with the fiction of stability and constancy, and have established our society (at least here, in my opinion) to promote that as the norm. Then, big changes are shocking and traumatic.

Like constant tectonic movement versus an earthquake. Earthquakes can be massively scary and destructive. But even more so when they shatter our illusion that the ground wasn’t moving the whole time.

The real trick is to take care of people through it, which we are seeing we can just do if we want. We have the means and the capacity to protect and provide for those who need. Which is good because we aren’t going back to the old way; we can’t. We are going forward.

“The world has changed many times, and it is changing again. All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than most, and they will be the ones who have lost far too much already. The best we can hope for is that the depth of this crisis will finally force countries—the US, in particular—to fix the yawning social inequities that make large swaths of their populations so intensely vulnerable.”