We made it. It wasn’t easy and it sure wasn’t pretty, but we made it through the week.

Sit back, take a breath, continue to breathe and then level your thoughts on the road ahead. It’s going to be long, it’s going to be hard and we’re going to be without. We will be forced to give up some of those things we do in our normal lives and we’ll have to alter other things to be sure we can still have some aspect of normalcy.

The harm that COVID-19 is causing to ourselves and the lives we enjoy to lead is high and for the foreseeable future will remain high.

This is our reality at this moment of time. We’ve faced things like this before, just as hard and just as trying, and yet here we are for one simple reason — we are resilient.

This is not the storm where we hunker in our basements and wait for it to pass. This is the aforementioned long road.

Thomas Paine wrote in his famed “American Crisis” in 1776, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” These words were spoken at a different time for a different crisis, but the words still ring true through the annals of history. That same fortitude, that same resilience is what we will tap into as we continue walking forward.

No, this is not the brief storm, but this will instead be the act of putting one step in front of the other, finishing one day at a time — one week at a time.

History will look back at this and they will judge us by our actions: our successes and our failures, but in the end they will see resilience and they will say, “well, they finished the week.”