We are so often engrossed in the past, and so often dictated by the future. But we are so often unaware of the present. Until now.

Now, everything is suddenly in the present tense. The uncertainty, the death, the fear, the misery, the fights, the races, the ideas, the divisions, the hope, the despair, the noise, the silence – all is happening now, faster than any of us can process. We are unused to this. So much of our study, our thought, and our commitments are to the past or to the future; so little to the now. Maybe this is because the present is intangible – an infinitely small division in time. Or perhaps it is because we have lost that electrifying yet often mortifying sensation of living through history – of things changing rapidly, permanently, fundamentally in a split-second, right before our eyes. We have broken the lull of normalcy, of continuity, of stability, and the result is horrifyingly alive.

It is a pervasive sense of presence, and it is jarring.

Jarring, because in addition to the incalculable scale of destruction and suffering the crisis has induced, the rate of change is truly something to behold. Each year, famine, thirst, and cancer kill many more than the pandemic has over the past few months. While the importance of each of these issues cannot be overstated, the coronavirus pandemic scares us – scares me – for three reasons: it is new, it is spreading rapidly, and it has caused ancillary crises unlike any seen for decades. A recession caused by government policy? A socio-economic catastrophe caused by a microscopic virus in a world of atomic weapons? A global pandemic driving people and nations even further apart? All this in a timespan measured by months, not by years or decades? Not in history textbooks or frightening climate simulations, but in the present? In my lifetime, and in yours? Now? Jarring.

On the most personal level, I can recall several moments from the past weeks where this unyielding sense of now felt strongest. As a Harvard student, the administration’s decision to de-densify campus. As a Canadian, the closure of the border with the United States. As a young person, the sacrifices being made to protect society’s most vulnerable. The list goes on, but the idea underlying these disparate impacts is uniform: they are all happening in the present, not in history, and not in the future. If only living through history were as glorious as it sounds. Reflecting on these events was difficult: not only do they substantially impact my small corner of the world, their speed also made stepping back difficult. I suppose each one was accentuated by the fact that I – as someone coming from a stable background – am unused to such crises. Despite the countless calamities that take place each day, for many of us, myself included, life is not characterized by fear, urgency, or things as we know them on life support (or on a ventilator), but rather by some form of stability, reflection, and predictability. The changes of extraordinary proportions that are happening these days are show-stopping in movies, moving in novels, and satirical in plays – in reality, though, they are dark, painful, and, frankly, unbearable. We crave some form of predictability, but it is being shot in the heart, each and every day. There is no room for the future in our heads The present tense – the now-ness in all of this – is dominant and profoundly scary.

Being locked in the now is thus partly to blame for the profound sense of pain, fright, and uncertainty many of us are experiencing these days. When will things go back to “normal,” whatever that means now? When will science find a treatment? Who is most vulnerable? All these questions are important ones. How do we process our feelings in a time of crisis? When will we be able to reflect on all that has happened, all that we have witnessed? Hard to tell – and with everything in the present tense, we struggle to find the words to answer them.