People in the pandemic; sports superstars; at the edge of the known world
I read three articles from recent issues of The New York Times Magazine that blew me away. In “I Feel Like I’m Just Drowning”, Sophomore Year in a Pandemic (NYT Magazine, 5/16/21), Susan Dominus offers us a deeply moving detailed report on her 8 months spent with a group of high school sophomores and their families and teachers. If you are like me (late 60’s in age, retired, financially secure, healthy, lots of friends and family, able to exercise with joy outdoors alone), then you may also be awe-struck by how different this last 15 months has been for most other people. Different in a challenging way (I’m tempted to say different in a bad way, although hopefully many of these other people will find the “bad” to have been “challenging” in that the lessons learned bring deeper understanding and insight into how to live and survive. It’s also true that bad things happen to good people. But I struggle to just accept that it’s happened, whatever it is. But this philosophizing is n