Plague Journal (8): In paths we have not known

Our sense of what shall be, what the future may hold, has become tenuous, unreliable.

We're walking down a proverbial dark alley. We can't turn back, but what's ahead seems very scary.

We're wishing it was all a bad dream, because that's what it seems like. The one where the danger keeps mounting, and your feet are stuck and you can't move, you can' run away, you're stuck in this place of mounting fear, until you wake up.

Or it's not like that at all.

Oh, you admit that the immediate future looks bad, but this too shall pass, you tell yourself. It's like you're part of some wandering tribe, and this tribe has come to a rushing river. The only thing to do is to get across . . . there's no going back, in no scenario is going back ever an option . . . to swim for it, every one of you. On the other side is dry land. On the other side, we'll have a party. We'll laugh. Then we'll get back to what it is we do, all of us except those who didn't make it across the river. Because some of us won't. 

These images, these scenarios, are only creations of the mind, trying to fill in the blank space that we call the future. My only point is, we've lost confidence in any of our old pictures. Oh, the future was always a debatable proposition, and much of our journalism was taken up with that debate. But most of us, down in our bones, in our daily walking-around lives, despite all the dire warnings about the future, lived each day like the next one, at least, was going to fall within manageable parameters.

Now, in our darker moments, we're not so sure. And we're not used to that.

The numbers yesterday were, I think, the grimmest yet. That is, more people died of the virus than on any day before this, both in the world as a whole and in the U.S. The president floated the idea of re-starting the economy by Easter, but he was simply wishing out loud. That's not going to happen. All the medical professionals say it wouldn't be wise, and the dire numbers (yesterday's positive tests, over 12,000, made for the highest single-day total yet) only confirm them.

I have taken to cooking something every day as a form of "making myself useful." We can at least have good food during this quarantine. I'll take a walk, finally finish that book I've been reading, text some friends, call a family member. And pray. Of course pray.

Meanwhile, here is what God will do:

I will lead the blind in a way they do not know,

in paths they have not known I will guide them.

I will turn the darkness before them into light,

the rough places into level ground.

These are the things I do,

and I do not forsake them.

Isaiah 42:16