So one important characteristic of the team is that the senior member of the team has gone through a series of significant transitions involving his vision.  First, he went permanently blind in one eye literally overnight, and he and his mate were terrified for the next period of time when the second one looked to be going the way of the first.

And then, over a period of time during which what still seems like a Christmas miracle occurred, the not-so-good still functional eye improved steadily and noticeably day-by-day for over a week straight.  One day I can barely make out the blurry shape of a sparrow standing right beneath my feet.  The next day I can discern the shapes of a row of cormorants a few hundred yards down the promenade.  And just a few days after that I am shocked and thrilled to realize I'd just seen a hummingbird.  Birding was back!

And over the course of those miraculous two weeks one domain after another came back incrementally - people's faces, bicycling, music, reading, photography, the entire spectrum of the current passions of my life returned, to the point that I feel like I've been reborn.

And then there's the third transition, in which one lens closed for good like an unrepairable Lumix but a third lens, the one pointing in the opposite direction, began opening wider and wider, revealing to me parts of myself that were laying hidden or dormant or repressed, and I feel like I'm viewing both myself and the lives of others now with more clarity than I ever have before, to the extent that I've come to viewing my transition as a well-disguised blessing.

There's of course much more that we can turn to next on this subject but we're going to defer those for later, stick them up as yellow post-it notes on our the white board of our virtual conference room, and  take some ground here.  Because one of my New Life resolutions is to write about one thought at a time.