The title of this very brief communication is the tag-line I use for the “On Becoming…” podcast.  It may also end up being the subtitle of the book that I’m moving through.  A book that is unfolding as part autobiography; part conversation with myselves (i.e. The Gregories I’ve been and become over the years); and part treatise on the ethics, pedagogy, and praxis path I’ve taken as a clinician, coach, mentor, husband, colleague, friend, and now elder in the world.  This is 50, yeah?

Yeah.

There remains a paradigm shift that I’ve made, and please understand I am here and now affixing no judgement or comparison regarding my experiences and decisions with your experiences and decisions or anybody’s experiences and decisions. 

This paradigm shift is: existing in and traveling the world entirely differently than I did pre-COVID/pre-2020.

As you may know, and if you don’t I’ll keep it brief, I lost my Mom to the pandemic in December 2020, lost my job, in part because of my tenacity in attempting to create change in the world of early learning and education, and ended up getting COVID myself just before starting a new job and career.

Welp, I have COVID again.

There are so many reasons why I don’t want COVID, why I don’t want my spouse and daughter with autoimmune contributions to have COVID again, and most of it swirls around what we know about long COVID and the impacts of multiple COVID infections, even for the fully vaccinated.

I still mask.  And I still got COVID again.  Two infections in four years.

This novel COVID virus, and it’s important to note that “novel,” here, means new.  We’ve never experienced it before.  It’s not like anything before.  (Notably, long COVID actually seems a bit like AIDS, but that’s another conversation for another day.)  And I find it very challenging sometimes to merely exist in the time of COVID primarily because this, along with climate change and Trumpism/MAGA and so many other quite obvious things, should have shifted paradigms.  And yet…

I realize that incrementalism is natural.  Things, at a human community/population level, don’t change on a dime.  It’s just hard.

Please take care of yourselves and each other.  Truly we are all we have.  Sending love, continued faith in younger generations, and genuine hope for harm-reducing paradigm shifts.

-Greg