Most people view the COVID-19 pandemic as a rare outlier of normal events. An aberration. It is important to recognize, though, that the process through which it emerged as a pandemic was not extraordinary at all. On the contrary, the direct and indirect transmission of the virus between people was a particularly vivid expression of the complex social process of everyday human interaction. For the most part, of course, this involves small-group and one-to-one conversations, rather than the exchange of potentially deadly, airborne particles! However, if we were to take our own and others' experience seriously, we would recognise that the pandemic brought into sharp focus our inability to predict and control what happens as a result of the widespread interplay of people's interactions, both locally and across the world. It is through this continuous, interactional process that we are all perpetually creating the future together - in all of its richness and beauty; ugliness and poverty; hope and despair.
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