Once in a lifetime9/22/2023 ![]() But there is research that gives us clues. I haven’t been able to find any surveys of what we most don’t miss from pre-pandemic times. In one recent survey, the specific things people said they yearned for most were traveling (24 percent), visiting family (19 percent), and hanging out with friends (16 percent). ![]() W hen people talk about life before the virus, their recollections are often sentimental: about the “good old days” about what we miss. Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. In these last weeks and months before something resembling normality returns, we might ask ourselves, “What do I want ‘normal’ to look like?” Then, we can start preparing for a new and better normal than what we took for granted until a year ago. Americans might be entering the waning days of the year-plus coronavirus pandemic, during which life’s ordinary patterns have paused for millions of people. Today, many of us have an opportunity to do something similar. And in so doing, she said, she became happy for the first time in her life. She tore her beliefs and values down to the studs, and rebuilt them. She vowed to take nothing in her former life as given. She had a unique opportunity to assess her priorities. Rather, it was the recovery time, away from ordinary routines, that created a punctuation mark in the long sentence of her life. Her parents always attributed these major character changes to her “bump on the head.” But she told me no-the injury had nothing to do with it. When she recovered, she was never the same: Her family relationships weakened she cut out former friends and found new ones she moved halfway across the world her interests and tastes changed she became more outgoing and less self-conscious she no longer cared much what other people thought about her. She suffered a period of total amnesia, followed by months of convalescence. As a young adult, she was in a serious car accident, resulting in a head injury. ![]() M any years ago, I met a woman who had had the kind of experience you ordinarily only find in fiction. “ How to Build a Life ” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. ![]()
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