Lightspeed

The speed with which everything is changing is frightening. We don’t even have time to analyse emotions or for the emotions to sink in. It’s still a week before our presumptive and canceled departure to Italy. And we are lucky we had advance notice of the pandemic and canceled everything. This last week has been a rollercoaster. The efforts of a generation to tear down walls and open borders for the free movement of people and goods were shattered in less than a week.  In the wake of a new enemy, a tiny virus, curtains started falling fast and borders rose one by one everywhere. And they closed faster than a lightspeed.  I still have a few posts to finish from our Morocco travel in January and I for sure can write about our past travels. Perhaps with time I will do. What else am I going to do, locked in our house anyway? Yet seeing what is happening in Italy, where my friend lives, is frightening. My heart is so heavy that I can’t focus on writing. When this is all done and over with, if we are still alive, travel will be a completely different thing. I can’t even imagine what it will look like. For years I’ve been saying – I have the feeling that the opportunities for travel are closing fast. But I never though of it closing this way. I thought of over-tourism. I thought of rising prices of accommodations. I thought of global climate change and skyrocketing flight fares that we would not be able to afford. I thought of us getting older and not being able to hike the mountains. I thought of countries’ political situations. I thought of… anything but a tiny virus with the potential to wipe millions off the earth. That belonged to science fiction. And it belonged to the past.

I hope with the efforts of everyone here in Canada that we don’t get to the direst situation that each and every doctor fears. Who gets the ventilator? It is so scary to even think of the moment a doctor has to grapple with such a moral choice that doctors in Italy are facing every day now.

To all our family and friends, to all our readers and to the entire world: Please put your health, the health of your neighbours, friends, city and country above your simple pleasures. Please keep yourself informed. Please follow the guidelines or rules imposed in your part of the world. And above all, please stay safe.