“You only need the light when it’s burning low, only miss the sun when it starts to snow,”. This chorus taken from “Let Her Go”, a popular song by Passenger, disguises a breakup as a more relatable life lesson to listeners of all ages. The lyrics convey how people often take their present situation for granted by always wishing for a better circumstance. This lesson pops into the lives of many people, whether they realize it themselves or are repeatedly reminded by friends and family; however, this numbing repetition often pushes that scenario in one ear out the other, until provoked by larger changes. Personally, those changes emerged on March 13th, 2020 and continue to taint my everyday life, a whirlwind of normal activities now filled with Covid precautions. 

As 8th hour concluded that Friday in March, I collected my things and nudged my way through the chaotic hallways of North in order to head to the locker room to get dressed for track practice. As everyone remembers, those frenzied corridors were not only due to the fact that it was Friday, rather the district had announced school was shutting down for two weeks because of a new concept called the Corona Virus. Expecting to stretch normally, I changed clothes and headed upstairs to the athletic hallway, but my teammate, Anna, flagged me down and pointed to the large gathering of teammates surrounding my coach. Little did I know this would be the final team meeting of my sophomore track season. Usually, practice was never cancelled. The track and cross country teams’ will to improve in both running and life reaches farther than things like rain or snow, and we take pride in that, even by calling ourselves all-weather women; therefore this determination only intensified the feeling of shock caused by all the immediate cancellations. The track team’s ability to work together in such an individual sport is another strength of ours. It is a rare occurrence that Mr. Iverson gives a speech without explaining that “Amazing things happen when the eightieth person on the team is working with and to be the seventy ninth person and when the seventy ninth is working to be the seventy eighth…”. This meeting was no exception. “You all know a main part of our mission statement is working together to make each other better; however, we have never had this situation before, so it will be difficult, but we have to figure out a way to work together without being together,” Mr. Iverson said, laughing at the irony of his statement. My friends and I exchanged concerned glances due to the fact that our strong team unity had somehow been dismantled. 

Eventually, those two weeks turned into three months. I originally assumed that upholding my motivation would be simple; however, this was far from correct. As I ran down the streets of my neighborhood, the pounding of my feet became louder and louder with each day that passed where I didn’t have anyone with which to run. I found myself surprised with the amount of self doubt I was experiencing. I realized that I was only focusing on things that were going wrong, like the inability to hit paces or psyching myself out, rather than what was going well. Without someone there saying, “You got this!” or “Stay strong!”, I discovered that nothing came close to the encouragement of teammates to extract me from that mindset. Self doubt proved to me that I allowed that appreciation for my teammates slip by in the monotony of in-person practice, and now those opportunities to express it had disappeared. Overall, this unprecedented part of my life opened my eyes to the fact that I can’t overlook the impact of a “Stick with me, I know you can” from a teammate because that is what generates positive workouts and environments. More holistically, I can’t focus on the “Sun when it starts to snow” or the “Light when it’s burning low”. I have to appreciate what is going well in that moment because those things not only assist one in overcoming challenges, but are the aspects that are greatly missed when they fade away.

I think we can all agree that Covid taught us something about ourselves. Personally, it showed me how every moment is a gift, and I need to treat life that way. Especially with Senior year flying by, it can be easy to get wrapped up in the stress of college applications or the crazy amount of homework that everyone is dealing with, but if Covid has taught me anything, it is that I should strive to realize that I am going to miss those moments once they are gone. My Senior year mindset has been boiled down to this: the goal isn’t to just push through to graduation, rather it is to make myself realize that I am going to miss sitting in classes with my friends or going to football games while I am actually experiencing those situations because that is how to guarantee the best memories with no regrets.