When Did it Happen?

When did it happen? Your kids growing up. Your time at school. Your career. Time, seemingly an illusion, is always relative to your position in space. It doesn’t take long before we are living in the past. When looking back, we can easily recount the grand moments, such as graduations, marriages, deaths, and divorces. But do we overlook the smaller transitory moments in between?

Last year, I visited with an artist in Vienna who celebrates the little-known artistic medium that transitioned the time between photography and painting. Before photography, those who wanted to know a far-away land or a distant relative had the option to travel—which was arduous and expensive—or view their likeness in a painting or a drawing. Today, we somewhat take for granted the ease with which we can see and appreciate a captured image.

The artist I met described a time period in the infancy of photography, where that medium was married to painting. To create images, light was reflected off a subject and impressed onto a paper canvas embedded with silver salts. Paint was then used to complete the image. It wasn’t yet the photographs we know today, but it also was not a detailed painting. It made me recognize that the shift from painting to photography wasn’t an overnight transition. Rather there was a transition period.

History, story-telling, and the media favor defined periods. Start and end times. On or off. In or out. But it is the unheralded in-between phases that capture the creativity of a moment, when something special is birthed and a moment is given life. The Roman empire is said to have gone from 300 BC to 476 AD, as if it really ended on one day. Electricity was discovered in 1831 by Faraday, but it wasn’t until 62 years later at the 1893 World’s Fair that we settled on AC as the dominant power source. And the automobile was developed in 1885 by Karl Benz, but it took another 32 years for the last horse buggy to be eliminated from New York City streets.

History and life aren’t clean, crisp, and sharp. While we prefer neat and manicured, time-stamped moments that line up perfectly, the reality is life’s moments are made up of sloppily overlapping gray, murky transitionary periods that are often overlooked.

We are currently in a transition period with the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic will not end on a specific date, hour, or minute. Rather, we will enter a transitory period where it will slowly fade from our every-day conscious; it won’t consume everyday decision-making, conversations, and family events. I think we can all foresee a future when once again we will be fretting about shark attacks off the east coast of Florida. It is then we will look back and smugly retell the stories of the neatly catalogued and defined “Great Pandemic of 2020-2021.”