Think back to the week of March 9th, 2020. Right before COVID turned everything to chaos, where were you? What were you doing? How was life going? And most importantly, what problems were you facing around that week, right as the pandemic officially began?

Six years and one day ago, on March 11th, 2020, I was a nervous wreck. And not because of the coronavirus.

At the time, I was a high school senior staring down a C in AP Literature, a grade that, if it held, would have knocked me out of salutatorian contention at graduation in June. Mrs. Jackson was a great teacher, but I could not have cared less about the symbolism in Beowulf or whatever Lord of the Flies was trying to say. I just wanted out. School had simply become a barrier standing between me and something I had been chasing for a long time.

I was preparing to run for a state-level position in FFA. The annual state convention was to start March 19th, just over a week away, and it was the culmination of years of work -three days of interviews, scenarios, and an election process that would determine whether I made the team. I was not feeling confident about it. In fact, I was terrified. I had just bombed a practice member scenario that a friend helped me run through, and I was spiraling. I was afraid I was going to cut and everything I had done would’ve been for nothing. But my worries went further than that. I was so afraid of who would’ve been elected had I gotten it, as I just had to have the right team around me. I had convinced myself that if I did not get the perfect lineup, the whole thing would fall apart. On top of that, two of my chapter officers were beefing big time, and being chapter president at the time meant it was, by default, my problem to solve. I was actively strategizing with my advisor on how to handle it. My plate was full and my anxiety was incredible high.

Whatever news about COVID at the time was background noise to me at that point. I had 99 problems, and whatever virus was not one of them.

That changed the night of March 11th.

The governor held a press conference announcing restrictions on gathering sizes and a two-week school closure, effective March 13th. Within an hour, state convention was cancelled. I went into a tailspin. What did this mean for school, for FFA? It all came crashing down at once, and I spent the rest of that week in a daze – less because of the actual pandemic, and more because of how disorienting it was to watch everything change that fast.

As it turned out, the problems weighing on 17-year-old me resolved themselves, though not in the ways I had expected. For my grades, everything that semester moved to pass/fail. My chapter officer team never saw each other again after school closed, so that conflict simply ceased to exist. State convention eventually went virtual, and I ran for and got elected to a state office position over a month later through a screen. But I did not get the perfect team, and the pandemic cast a shadow over the entire year. That year of my life, or anything after with FFA, did not get the ending I had hoped for.

So at this point, you might be wondering what any of this has to do with me currently, or you.

The answer is: it doesn’t.

That English grade did not determine whether I got into law school. It did not define anything that followed. I have not seen most of the people I went to high school with since moving to Louisville. State office ended five years ago, and I am still genuinely close with only one of my teammates from that year. Every problem that felt urgent and consuming in March 2020 has since dissolved into nothingness in my life that kept moving forward.

And the same is true for you.

There is something worth sitting with in that realization. It would be too easy (and a little dishonest) to say that none of it mattered at the time, because it really did. Those problems were real, and the stress attached to them was real. I remember sitting there with those feelings, as I imagine you’ve sat with yours at moments like those. But there is a meaningful difference between something feeling important and something actually being important in the long run. Most of what consumes us on a daily basis falls into the first category far more than the second one does.

A lot of our problems are mostly self-created. The things we say, the choices we make, and the way we interpret what happens to us all contribute to the predicaments we find ourselves in. It’s not a happy life lesson, but it is an honest one. Our worldview is shaped entirely by the experiences we have accumulated, and those experiences determine what we perceive as a crisis versus what we let roll off. We do not always control what happens to us, but we have far more control over our response to it than we tend to give ourselves credit for.

Problems also have a tendency to expand to fill whatever mental space we give them. Whenever you spend most of your energy fixating on something, it starts to feel bigger and more consequential than it actually is. We can make mountains out of molehills not because we are weak or irrational, but because sustained attention distorts the scale of the problem we’re facing. The more you orbit around a problem, the larger and more central it appears to you.

Which is why perspective is everything. Think honestly about what was consuming you in March 2020. How much of it is still affecting your life today? The answer is close to nothing. Now flip it around: take whatever you are carrying right now and ask yourself whether it will matter in March 2032. Honestly. Not whether it feels important now, but whether it will have any meaningful bearing on your life six years from now.

In most cases, it will not.

I want to be clear that this is not nihilism. Putting your problems into perspective does not mean pretending they do not exist, or that nothing matters. It means choosing not to spend your finite time and energy treating every problem like it is world-ending when almost all of them are not. It means caring more about the things that will actually matter and worrying less about the things that will not. It is a discipline, and an honest one.

So the next time something has you spiraling, pause and ask yourself: is this going to matter in March 2032? Because if the problems you had in 2020 did not make it six years (and they didn’t), there is a good chance this one won’t either.

-Colby