March 13th, 2026.
Yes, it’s Friday the 13th. But it’s something else you might have missed. You might have forgotten it, but there’s something else.
March 13th, 2020. Another Friday the 13th in history.
Donald Trump was still president back then, just like he is now. It’s weird, right? But he, and many other world leaders, also shut down the planet.
The COVID lockdowns began on this date six years back.
Listen, nobody wants to talk about it. We moved on since then, but we also haven’t. We have gotten ourselves mired endlessly in debate about politics and war, and there’s been conflict and hatred and chaos and disagreement. We moved on since then and we were told to trust the science back then, to the point now where we doubt everything.
But during those fateful first days, things were really weird, weren’t they?
Remember. Unless maybe only remember for a minute and then move on, right? But they were weird.
I distinctly remember my son was only nine, in fourth grade. School got closed for that two week period of time and all of us knew in the back of our heads this will not end this year. And it didn’t. Along with the not ending, it just kept getting worse.
We’re not going to go back and revisit history, but we’re going to go back for a moment just to put things in perspective. The perspective of time.
Think about this, kids who graduated during COVID most likely have now been graduated for about a year or so from college. That’s how fast time has gone.
Kids who were freshmen during COVID are in their first or second year of college now, or their first or second year of whatever lifestyle and future they chose or ended up with.
Many people who were sick during COVID in those early days in nursing homes and care centers died alone. Families have had to grapple with that since.
Yes, the media promoted dancing nurses, whatever that was, and Italian people singing songs on their porches and balconies in Italy.
They didn’t really show the images of family members gathered outside a window in the cold watching mom or dad die in a hospital bed inside alone without the grasp of human connection at the very end.
We also perhaps have moved on because we just don’t want to talk about that anymore.
But I’m bringing it up to get it back into your brain, just to consider where we were and what we were and how we were.
My son being nine, I remember filling a bathtub for him and I had a mini panic attack about the idea that life will never return back to normal ever again. That what we were confined with in our homes would be forever. Or that we would all die like in Stephen King’s The Stand.
Well, we didn’t all die. But many of us did lose people. My mom did. Maybe yours did too.
Eventually, from the stress of all of it, my father passed away not long after my mom.
And when my mom was passing away in a nursing home, we all had COVID in November of 2021.
That’s my personal tale, but that’s not something I’m going to dwell on because you have your personal tales as well.
There are some good memories too. Listen, for some people who don’t like going out in public, maybe lockdowns weren’t all that bad in a sort of funny way.
But also we had those dreams back then.
I don’t know if you remember that. I don’t know if you recall people across the whole planet online speaking about very strange, vivid dreams.
I remember one of my dreams to this day. It was in the midst of COVID. I think I even wrote about it back then here somewhere.
I dreamed I was looking out my back window of the home and I was watching myself and my son dig a hole that, for some reason in my dream, I remembered being for my father.
That stood out to me. A lot of things stand out to me.
I remember all of us as a society becoming very overworked because we didn’t know when to shut the computer down or turn things off.
But it’s all over now, right? It’s all done.
It changed us, but it’s all done.
I think it changed us in ways we don’t even realize.
Yes, the obvious stuff is there. It created mental health and physical health ailments. It made schooling be a bit dicey. It made the workplace be a bit strange. It changed ways of life for good to the point where there are very few diners open at 2:00 in the morning to get an apple pie and a coffee like in a good 1980s movie.
Most of the time things are closing up at 8:00 or 9:00 at night.
So we’ve been changed in little ways and big ways too.
Six years is a long time.
But yet, in some weird way, it felt like timelines got altered and it all just went by in the blink of an eye.
