Still the best therapy

NASHVILLE — A two-week bout with flu turned me into a person I didn’t recognize — a hopeless, coughing, exhausted person. I lay in bed, phone in hand, skipping from news outlet to news outlet: refreshing, clicking, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. The news was always bad, every update worse than the one before.

By the time my fever broke for good, Covid-19 was an official pandemic, and the news was all about social distancing: no meetings, no coffee dates, no dinner parties, no book clubs. I work from home, and the loss of such communal activities would have been disheartening if it weren’t for the fact that the world had changed during the two weeks I spent in bed.

I don’t mean our cities and towns, our trailer parks and hamlets. True, this pandemic has altered our lives so fundamentally and so suddenly that no amount of scrolling can explain it in a way that sinks in. For the worried well, our whole world is now unrecognizable, and it’s too soon to tell what it will look like when the virus finally burns out.

But there’s another world that has always existed both apart from and alongside civilization. While I was sick it changed, too, in the age-old turning of the earth itself. By the time I could walk outside again, springtime had come to Tennessee...

I can scroll and worry indoors, or I can step outside and remember how it feels to be part of something larger, something timeless, a world that reaches beyond me and includes me too. The spring ephemerals have only the smallest window for blooming, and so they bloom when the sunlight reaches them. Once the forest becomes enveloped in green and the sunlight closes off again, they will wait for another year. Sunlight always returns the next year.

Margaret Renkl, nyt