Happy Election Day…
I wish I could say that whatever you think will happen today is definitely going to happen.
I wish that we could assume that result will arrive early enough to go to bed at a decent hour (and since this email is going out to someone in Amsterdam, it would require a very early result).
I wish I could say that you will be decently satisfied with the results and see improvement in America almost immediately.
And of course, I wish I could say the anxiety will go away!
Unfortunately, we’re in the middle of the story now and we’re bad at telling stories while we’re in the middle of the plot.
We’re simply miners right now. All we can do is continue to dig. We can’t say what we’ll find or what it will mean.
So try as we might to create a cohesive narrative on election day, we’re missing a key ingredient.
Perspective.
In the middle of a job where I was overwhelmed, I continually tried to make it a story. I tried to predict how it was going to end and what lessons I was gaining. However, in the end, I was wrong on both counts. I realized that the ending was inevitable with some distance, and the lessons were different but more important.
I think that’s how we’ll look back on 2020.
Perspective comes from reflection, and reflection can only happen when we can look back at something. We don’t have a mirror in front of us when we’re in the middle of a story, and we have no crystal ball to see the future (not even using FiveThirtyEight).
We don’t know what today will mean yet, but we know how we feel right now. Those feelings matter. Let’s focus on those today.
Someday, with perspective, we’ll be able to tell the story of the 2020 Election. It’s just not possible while we’re in the middle of things.