First off, I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired. Time has become elastic, hasn’t it? Did that just happen in the last 10 days or 10 minutes? I’m thinking the last four or five months seem like 24 or 25.

The VM team just put together this massive July-August special double issue. We’ve been racing to keep up with ‘what’s going on out there’ since the advent of the pandemic. And like everyone, we comment among ourselves, time is elastic, isn’t it? Either it moves waaay too slow, or way too fast.

I’d like to thank my friend Jan Cory, now the EVP and chief commercial officer of I-deal Optics for sending me this quote:

“It’s been said that there are decades where nothing happens; and then there are weeks when decades happen.”

The quote was written by StartUp Health co-founders Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes and, actually, they were talking about the pace of new health care startups for their super-interesting investment community.

But the point is, we all spend a great deal of time here at VM exploring trends, reporting news and writing about change but since COVID-19, we are dealing with change on interplanetary levels—it’s change with a capital “C.”

For many of us and all of you out there, the current year we’re in is so momentous on so many fronts—personal, professional, health, family, business, economic, environmental, cultural, political and spiritual... I mean what else can it have room to include?

For everyone, being able to see it all and just navigate the decisions can be overwhelming. But people are finding their way through. They are pivoting and rethinking and reprioritizing to cope, get through it, grow. We’re glad for that!

In this special issue, we talk to PE-backed management groups and others who are navigating expansion in such a climate and fielding conversations from interested independent ECPs who are looking for support, resources and new options for their practices.

In addition, this month we ask you to help us celebrate an incredibly impressive group of people who are among those doing that and charting the path forward for so many in this vision care and eyewear realm. This is the 18th year that Vision Monday has reached out to our readers to learn about the contributions and attributes of so many women influencing this business. This is the first year we’ve chosen 50 of them, so taken were we with the scope of their achievements and what they’re accomplishing. Join us in congratulating them.

This has certainly been a period of time where decades of change have transpired quickly, radically.

All of us can find support and inspiration from these #Luminaries who are among those who will lead us through it.

maxelrad@jobson.com