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So this blog is a kind of almost stream of consciousness – or at least partly – but it’s also to do with something that I read recently, probably on social media – not preaching – just paraphrasing something that I read which, to me, personally anyway, helps put things into perspective during these very strange days indeed.

So all credit to whoever it was, that posted this wherever it was, and I think it’s written from an American’s perspective, so, no apologies for that, but allow the English perspective to merge with this and you’ll get the idea, so it goes like this…

It’s a mess out there now. Hard to discern between what’s a real threat and what’s just simple panic and hysteria.

For a small amount of perspective at this moment, imagine you were born in 1900.  

On your 14th birthday, World War I starts and ends on your 18th.

22 million people perished during that war.    

Later in the year, a Spanish Flu epidemic hits the planet and runs until you’re 20.

50 million people die from that.

Then on your 29th birthday, the Great Depression begins. Unemployment hits 25%, and the World GDP drops by 27%, and that goes on until you’re 33. The country nearly collapses along with the world economy.  

Then you turn 39, and World War II starts – and you aren’t even over the hill yet. Between your 39th and 45th birthday, 75 million people perished in World War II.  

Next, smallpox, the epidemic that lasted until you were in your 40’s – it killed 300 million people during your entire lifetime.   

When you’re 50, the Korean War starts. 5 million perish.

From your birth, until you turn 55, you dealt with the fear of polio epidemics every summer. You experience friends and family contracting polio, being paralysed and/or dying.   

When you reach 55, the Vietnam War begins and doesn’t end for 20 years. 4 million people perished during that conflict, and not forgetting the Cold War during which you lived each day with the fear of nuclear annihilation.

When you’re 62 you have the Cuban Missile Crisis which is a tipping point in the Cold War and life, as we knew it, almost ended.

Turning 75, the Vietnam War finally ends.  

So I wasn’t born in 1900, but the ‘thrust’ of this, if you like is the fact that if you were born in 1900, and lived till you were 75 – how would you endure all that?

So if you were a kid in 1985 you may’ve thought that your 85-year-old grandparent didn’t understand how hard school was – and yet they survived through everything that I’ve just mentioned. So, the upshot of this is that perspective is an amazing ‘art’ and is a word I probably over-use in everyday conversation with almost everyone I know!

And the ‘art’ of perspective has been refined as time goes by.

Keeping things “in perspective”, your parents and/or grandparents endured all of this – and now we all, are being asked to stay home – and sit on our couch…