Unprecedented, historic, strange.
As much as these adjectives are painfully accurate to describe COVID-19 days, here’s the other side of the coin: everything has changed, but it also hasn’t at all.
The “COVID Connection” project was originally meant to be an honest snapshot of how different life has become inside coronavirus confines. It was a daunting task for us as filmmakers – create a moving, human interest video without picking up a camera or having face-to-face human interaction.
How are we to know what’s going on out there if we can’t leave our living rooms? Is life even happening right now?
We quickly collided with an immovable reality. No matter what, we remain people.
We remain people.
Life is still very much happening right now. It’s happening on the other side of the planet, and it’s happening in our own mirrors. Our team didn’t have to look very far for the profound, for the mundane, the highs, the lows – everything that daily writes our stories regardless of the backdrop.
As the recordings that compose “COVID Connection” started pouring in from folks graciously allowing a glimpse into their worlds, we found exactly what we were looking for. Life.
This pandemic has touched all of us. It has changed us. It has disrupted us and even killed some of us.
But no matter what your experience has been, I submit to you that COVID-19 is not subtracting from but rather magnifying all the grit, fragility, resilience, pain, joy, life, and death that make us the sacred beings we are.
I encourage us all to look closely enough into the unfamiliar to see what we have always known. Our gift. Our curse. What a beautiful, broken blessing it is to be human.
We truly are #InItTogether.
