Last week, my wife and I, having both been vaccinated, decided it was prudent to resume having maskless dinners with vaccinated dear friends. I assume something similar is going on this spring all over America.

Let’s pause to mark the moment. There will be no official "end" to the pandemic, like V-E Day or the Berlin Wall coming down. But this is as close as it will get.

We’ve now had meals with three sets of good friends, and the experience is much more moving than I would have anticipated. We have returned from purgatory to something intensely joyous and exuberant.

The conversation feels richer and more vivid; the food tastes better. I have more appreciation for these good people. It’s as if we are living in color again, rather than in black and white, like the scene when Dorothy lands in Oz.

If I were a stoner, I might say it feels like being on some kind of performance-enhancing drug. But the experience itself is a sufficient high. Even getting a haircut, or going to the dentist for the first time in 15 months, is a high.

It makes us appreciate how much we had missed when we were in bunker mode: just seeing people, movies, shows, shopping, having restaurant meals—the humdrum stuff of daily life that seems so ordinary and unremarkable until it is snatched away. Being with family again.

We were relatively fortunate in the pandemic. I mostly work at home anyway. My wife and I don’t mind teaching on Zoom (though God knows enough is enough). We have no small kids at home. So our enforced confinement was not all that stressful, most of all because we like each other’s company.

Still, this really does feel like a reprieve from hell. Resolution: Now that quasi-normal is back, let’s take time to appreciate all of it, especially the people.

After all, even if the pandemic is truly subsiding, the reprieve is temporary. None of us gets out of here alive.

And, since this is The American Prospect and not The American Existentialist, there are political implications—and an eerie parallel. We can appreciate having a normal government back, knowing that a normal democracy is not back. Let’s resolve to cherish and defend democracy as dearly as we cherish our restored domestic tranquility.

Here is one more resolution: The pandemic is far from over in the rest of the world. As humans, we need to do everything in our power to make vaccinations universal.