Is it out of character of me to write a short post about the heart of the place I live?
See, I used to work downtown.
Used to, in that the job I currently have the privilege to do from the safety of my home was once and may again in the future be based out of one of the many high-rise buildings in the downtown core of our city.
Today it is based out of my basement.
This allows me to go for beautiful walks around my neighbourhood at lunch.
It lets me cook grilled cheese sandwiches on my barbecue grill whenever the mood strikes.
I’ll have the opportunity to work on my garden all summer.
I should be able to fit some extra runs in as the months wear ever onward.
And sitting on my deck with my dog by my side, a coffee in my hand, and a laptop computer humming on the table in front of me is a kind of work-life balance I could not have dreamed possible a couple years ago.
That said, this morning I made one of those rare trips “to the office” to sort out some administrative tasks that I cannot do remotely.
On my walk towards my tower, I snapped a photo of one of those notice boards, the kind where shows, plays, festivals, and a thousand other cultural touchstones hang posters with dates and times and locations. Or… where they used to do that.
Like the empty streets, boarded up shop windows, and mostly-vacant office towers, this felt positively apocalyptic to me.
Nothing new posted.
The old, ripped, torn, peeled off leaving behind a shredded, shattered mess, a snapshot of the time that never was to follow those months when back then, when I retreated from downtown along with a hundred thousand others.
My personal opportunity has narrowed and I’ve adapted.
I wonder how it will feel to find a way back to a rich cultural society, particularly when I see things like this.
What was the opportunity cost of my could-have-been-worse fortunes?