It was precisely 3:15 p.m. I remember glancing up at the clock in the clinic as the nurse unwrapped the syringe. I thought, this is the moment I've longed for and thought about for months - and it's finally here. And yet it was so - quiet. The nurse was calm and efficient, the people arriving for their appointments were cheerful and casual. "Ready?" she asked, and I nodded. One small prick, and it was over.
As I left, another woman boarded the elevator behind me. We smiled at one another from behind our masks. In the silence, riding down together, she mused aloud, "How can something so small feel so big?"
Well said. Those words have been tugging at my sleeve ever since. Walking around with that humble little bandaid on my arm and that precious card in my wallet, I thought back to that moment.
It had been a huge relief, of course. After so many months of worry and struggle, it felt in that moment like a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. But as I thought back, there'd been more than that. I had had the oddest feeling that I wasn't alone - that the room was full of people.
Suddenly I wondered, how many people, all around the world, were getting the vaccine too, right when I did? How many were sitting down and rolling up their sleeves? I was one of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world - people who'd waited in long lines on city streets, crowded into tiny clinics or lined up in echoing stadiums. Is that why the room felt somehow crowded? How many have done this before me?
So I looked on the CDC website, and the numbers were there: I was one person in a long, long line of millions - one of 85,472,166 Americans. One of 475.5 million people around the world.
Think about it. How many events have we lived through where nearly every person in the whole world, in every country, was experiencing it, too? That hasn't happened since World War II, I think. Just about every person in the world has heard of the coronavirus and has had their lives touched by the crisis in some way. All around the world we've been wearing masks, going through lockdowns and coping with the effects. It's made its way into every home and school and clinic, from the smallest Midwest towns to refugee camps in Syria. From Botswana to Norway, from Seattle to Paris, it's closed schools, filled hospitals and turned all of our lives upside down.
Some have been fortunate to be only lightly affected. But millions more have been crushed by it - they've lost loved ones or friends, or struggled through weeks themselves in the hospital. Millions live with lingering effects. Still more have lost their jobs and even their homes. And it's rested most heavily of all on the poor and minorities, reaping a horrible harvest.
In this dreadful time we've seen how small our world has become. A cough a thousand miles away can travel here and back again in a matter of weeks. We've always heard our world is connected; now the truth is painfully clear. What we do matters to everyone.
We're sick, as a world, all seven billion of us, and we need to work together if we're going to survive this. It's a huge, complicated effort, but if we don't do our best to get help to everyone, all over the world, we'll keep on dying.
That's why the room felt so crowded. When I sat down and rolled up my sleeve, I was just one small person out of billions of people, all of us struggling to find our way across this mighty river - not just the lucky ones who've gotten the vaccine and are nearly there, but also with the millions who are still on the shore, calling, What about us?
I'm grateful, but I can't help thinking we've got a long way to go.
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