I have now been on this planet for 72 years and in that time I have seen some radical shifts: the Cuban missile standoff, the assassination of our president and his brother, men walking on the moon, commercial jet travel, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Beatles, hippies, Vietnam, Nixon, the internet, home computers, 9-11, the CD, Nelson Mandella, movies on demand, Barack and Michelle Obama, Trump. Each milestone seemed impossible to top in their moment yet, as I look back on them, they were but blips in the wonderfully complex world I have been blessed to be part of.
And now we're in yet another of those radical moments. Each morning at 10:30 I head to my computer and virtually join our team of 10 in engineering. We chat, we laugh, then we get down to the business at hand. In one respect it's no different than when that same meeting took place just outside my office, but in another, it's world's different and I wonder if it will ever be the same—and then I catch my foolish self. No, of course it will not be the same. It cannot ever be the same.
It's called change.
On first blush, it seems like this moment might just be crazier than any other, but then I remember thinking that very same thought on so many of my life's earlier milestones.
I recall thinking my parent's lives were so much simpler, a time when the world made more sense, but then I recall their own radical shifts of their day: the Korean Conflict, polio, the atomic bomb, World War II, penicillin, the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, millions displaced from their homes, moving from animal power to machines. My father remembered the arrival of the first car in the small Nebraska town he grew up in, and how the horses bolted and ran at the sight of it.
In hindsight, I believe this time is yet another of those big blips. That all through each lifetime there are peaks and valleys as high and as low as any other.
We will one day look back on this time and be thankful to have gotten through it to witness the next.
