Throughout the pandemic, as we've cycled through serial reopenings and retightenings, shortages and blockages, we've always been bolstered by the expectation that soon it would be over and life would return to normal, that superabundance to which we had all become so accustomed and which we had come to believe was our birthright. And then along comes Putin, who says: not quite yet, my friends. I'm going to fuck with you some more. So we return to yet another new normal, with another new set of challenges weighing on our supply chain and our value chain.
But again, perhaps we are faced with another version of the same challenge by the universe because we so singularly failed to rise to the most recent one. We need to get our act together, figure out what we are about on this planet and focus on doing that.
Twice on Friday a client and I tried restaurants for lunch, only to be gently turned away. One wasn't open because it couldn't staff the shift. The other had only one server so we had to wait 20 minutes to be seated. So we went to another one. In the grocery store on Sunday I'd say 95% of the things we were looking for were stocked, whereas at PetSmart we got one of the two special cat foods we feed our delicate-stomached felines, and they didn't have our preferred litter. We will get them elsewhere or get something else. For now, we have to let these little challenges remind us not just of how much we have, but of how delicate and fragile is the balance of forces that lets us have so much.
We need only look at the pictures of Ukraine coming to us each day to be reminded of how much that is.
No comments:
Post a Comment