Goodbye to the year of living day by day. For better and worse, it’s time to plan again.

Not long into the pandemic, whenever someone asked me “How are you?” I took to saying the most honest thing I knew: “Just living day by day.”

The first time I heard that answer pop out of my mouth, it made me pause and think: Am I? Really? Am I even capable of that? And I realized, yeah, to the extent that living day by day was possible for the highly revved engine of my brain, I was. In the midst of a pandemic, what was the option?

And so it’s become my standard reply, a truthful answer that also reminds me that it’s how I want to live.

Deep down we all know that we’re always living day by day, that we could be yanked from this mortal life in a fraction of a second. There are countless quotable quotes and singable songs built around the idea: Tomorrow is promised to no one. Sha la la la live for today. Be here now.

We say such things, we sing them, but given the opportunity to think about the future rather than the moment, we allow our minds to be pulled forward, forward, forward, toward some elusive place we imagine is better.

We often call this forward-thinking “planning,” and it feels like a survival mechanism: Plan for the future and you’ll have a future.

But then the little virus came, and our notions of the future were upended.

Weekend plans? Summer plans? Holiday plans?

The pandemic hit the brakes on everything. Restaurants: closed. Offices: closed. Concerts: canceled. Travel: complicated.

In that state of life suspended, we were forced to live one day at a time. For many people, it caused deep, physical, financial hardship. But for others, the hardship was mostly in the mind, and if we could, we shifted our relationship to time.

If we planned, it was close to home and cheap. It involved the internet and takeout. Planning a month ahead felt like planning a trip to Mars: impossible, so why pretend?

But lately we’re able to plan again. Vaccines are available. Mask requirements are easing. We venture back into restaurants. The outdoor bacchanal known as Lollapalooza is on the summer schedule.

The return to planning is liberating and exciting. But — dare I say it? — it has its downside. A friend of mine expresses the ambivalence well.

“Prior to COVID,” she says, “I carried my (print) planner around with me literally everywhere. As COVID started, I found myself erasing, erasing, erasing in it until there was nothing left to erase. And then I found myself leaving it at home, where it got buried at times in other paperwork, because there was nothing really to plan for outside of that day. I went from hating that, and feeling really empty, to liking it. Now that I’m starting to fill it up again, I have mixed feelings. It feels great to pencil in things that I’m looking forward to, but I don’t particularly like waking up on a Saturday morning and realizing my day is already promised away. Even if it’s stuff I want to do!”

When the history of the pandemic is written, it will record that some people called it “a lost year.” I’ve heard that a lot. “We’ve lost a whole year,” they say, and it’s true that it has been a year of profound loss.

In the United States alone, 586,000 people have lost their lives. The families and friends of those people have lost someone they love. Many people have lost their jobs, their homes.

But for those of us who are still here, the year itself was not lost. It was time passed in an extraordinary way, in a different rhythm.

A couple of days ago I stumbled on a notepad that I used last spring to scribble my stray pandemic thoughts. On one page, I had written: We are living in a time of truth.

That truth has had many tentacles. One truth I hope to hold on to, even as it becomes reasonable to plan again: Whether we feel it or not, we’re all still living day by day.

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