Outgoing Editor’s comment: Time Passes (Editorial de la Editora Saliente: El tiempo pasa)

Abstract

In the last few months, the song Years (Años) by the Cuban musician Pablo Milanés, famously interpreted by the Argentine Mercedes Sosa, has been repeating over and over in my head. Where and how have the years gone by? Especially the last three years are blurry in my memory. The COVID-19 pandemic has, among other things, caused havoc to my notion of time. When we launched our editorial leadership in 2017, we had a series of objectives that we summarized under three themes: openness, dialogue and connection (Brizuela, 2018). In 2016, when I accepted the Editor-in-Chief position, which began in January 2017, never could I have imagined what we would live through in the following years, and especially what we have lived through since March 2020. I still remember those first two weeks of March 2020, when we were receiving news of the spread of COVID-19 in Asia and then across Europe, Seattle and New York. During those weeks I stopped shaking hands, choosing instead to bow. I started to cancel in-person meetings and to use Zoom instead. Before March 2020 I had only heard about Zoom occasionally, and definitely had not used it as a verb! And on Friday 13 March, I left my office thinking I would return in a couple of weeks. I even left behind my poor little plants! In the following months and year I would only go back into my office in person a few times, always on the weekend so I wouldn’t bump into anyone. I was able to recover my little plants, which still survive! Suddenly, the themes of openness, dialogue and connection that we proposed in 2016 when launching our editorial leadership took on different, deeper meanings, and would be relevant not only to our editorial work in the journal but to our everyday lives as well. The confinement and social distancing measures would make us yearn for openness. At the same time, the extreme openness of a global world, added to a highly and easily transmissible virus, contributed to the spread of the virus throughout the world in record time. Our need for dialogue, and the importance of dialogue in all areas of our life, led us to use new platforms that we had not used before. We became familiar with Zoom ‘breakout rooms’, where we sought to reproduce the intimacy of conversations in small groups. We held different celebrations on Zoom (I celebrated my fiftieth birthday on Zoom and with videos sent from across the world!), and we used WhatsApp and its different functions to their fullest