Is this the time to look for compensation?  At least we finally can say it’s truly Spring.  Those that can will walk and listen to the birdsong and maybe even find a little peace; unlooked for or prayed for, unlikely but making a pure kind of sense.  God knows we need such moments.  A friend of mine watches a raven for how long he doesn’t quite know.  Others gather weeds along newly familiar paths.  I shelter from the suddenly seasonal sun, think about summer, feel a strange sense of assurance that might have nothing and everything to do with my own one temporal fate.

Will things be different after all of this?  Will the flights resume, the factories stutter back into some kind of life?  Bars, cafes, shops stammer open like nothing has happened at all and we’ll wipe away the salt of weeks alone or crammed in close confinement?  Gratitude right now seems pretty likely; a bloody-minded courtesy, acknowledging we still can breathe, we still can take in each day in the air like it was our first.

And somehow we must al of us come through; survivors, witnesses, beleaguered or hopeful and strong.  It’s no time for sweeping statements, triumphalist crows that we know when the end is in sight, or that this is all part of some grand scheme of nature, that there is reason for this other than some random roulette.  We can give in to terror, despair but we might as well be optimistic or look for very major silver linings.

It’s not some random fantasy to say there might be some grace in all this, or chance of it, if we can take the perspective that we might in the long run be getting thrown a line.  A frenetic world of global commerce, global travel has just hit the brakes.  We might as well enjoy the sudden peace.  We have a chance to stop and think, reflect on the lives we’ve been leading.  Can we imagine our way out of this?

Maybe we’ll be able to step forward into a world where just-in-time networks of supply and demand are replaced by something more resilient, that we can source and grow the goods we need a little closer to home, where we’re all weaning off a glut of luxury but still live well and maybe a little more honestly, not dependent on imports whose source we can’t name, where conditions of labour or livestock are hushed out of sight.  Maybe we’ll see a return of the domestic economy, hollowed out in the 20’s and 30’s where we’re all a little more self-reliant.  How many containers of latest electronics does the world really need? How much of our once-innate ability to source our needs at home or close to it are we happy to continue to relinquish?  How much do we really want to spend large parts of our working week in little boxes, hurtling their cargo to horizons whose value we’ve only too nearly forgotten?

No one would wish these times on another or any others we do not consider our clan.  For we are all connected now, connected in brightness and grief.  But we owe it to ourselves and one another, to every huddled in hospital beds and most of all to the children to see there are gifts here if we can only see them as such.  Somebody somewhere appeared to hit pause and now we can think and plan and even dream.  We can think on the state of the planet today, her all-too-clear signs of distress, how we can help her, the habits we can break, how we can renew our commitments (or make them at all if now new), how we can seek to redeem the unspoken bond we have broken, a rift that may have something to do with our current plight, as if collective survival rests in a natural corrective.

Whether we see the virus as a desperate manifestation of the will of the world to endure or something far more arbitrary in arguably besides the point.  Whatever the reason for it and whatever our thoughts, we can see that while no one would wish for the virus, it’s still giving us a chance.  The kind of world we all step into when the threat recedes may depend on the degree to which we can reimagine our world, reimagine our place upon it, how we serve it, cast away the things that hinder or obstruct.

We’re used at times like these to being told we are enduring a great trial, are being put to the test, tempered, told we must be strong.  And all of these are true.  We can pull upon the deep well of our inner reserves; our patience, compassion and will to endure.  We can show the extent of collective resolve, our ability to adapt and our strength in adversity’s face.  And we can meditate on that which can bring us all peace; our own peace of mind and that of those all around us; at times like these its necessity is only made clearer than ever.

But there’s another element as well; that we are being given opportunities, if we can see them.  The degree to which we make the most of them may depend upon our ability to walk with eyes open, to imagine and dream again, dream harder.  Our future remains a thing we can all of us shape.  We now have a chance just to stop and slow down and reflect how we do so.  We have a little time.  And perhaps time is all that is called for, for now, that all our haste and rush, our daily and global migrations, our obsession with temporal efficiencies has been for so long such a part of the problem.  We have the chance to remember to just be ourselves; an estrangement it’s high time to heal.