The final song of Act 1 in the long-running Broadway musical Les Miserables is a choral number with most of the show’s stars: One day more / Another day / Another destiny / This never-ending road to Calvary. Those words came to mind recently when a client said to me that his philosophy the past few months is, “Make it through today.”
Exactly four months ago, 500,000 people were diagnosed with Covid-19 in the world and 23,000 had died. Now, those numbers are 16 million and 650,000. For every piece of potentially good news, there seems to be a correlating, “Yes, but…”
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the lack of certainty in what comes next. Are we close to a vaccine, even though there is a long way to go with testing? Will public schools eventually have children in classrooms nationwide or is a virtual semester ahead? Do the leaders in Washington provide another round of financial support or has the national debt exceeded their willingness to prop up the economy?
The short answer: No one knows.
Thus, ‘Make it through today’ is perhaps the best approach to getting to the other side of this pandemic and whatever the ‘New Now’ turns out to be. It takes patience, discipline, a good bit of affirmation, and a belief that this, too, shall pass.
As the last words of One Day More say: Tomorrow we’ll discover / What our God in heaven has in store / One more dawn / One more day / One day more!
