I keep seeing my health disaster as a metaphor for the global disaster. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The global troubles mirror my own. As I recover, I keep trying to impose a recovery metaphor on the bigger world too. It might all be wishful thinking.

I would like my recovery to be orderly. I want predicable progress towards something more like who I used to be. This mirrors my desire to have an orderly recovery from whatever [waves arms frantically in all directions] all of this is. The world order is upside down. As Prime Minister Trudeau said, “Make that make sense.” We can’t.

Recovery, for me and for all of us, will not be smooth.

I’m not expecting to get back to normal. Whatever that is. Whatever that was. Normal is an illusion, an ever-shifting sand dune, nostalgia. We live in the present and the present is full of surprises. I just want to get little better than I am now.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about my long held belief in Dr. King’s notion that the arc of the moral universe is long and bends towards justice. Most of my life, I’ve had a beautiful graph in my head, a mostly smooth arc, rising (admittedly not as fast as I’d like) towards a just society.

Of course that’s nonsense. The arc of that graph is far from smooth. Ask anyone being lynched. Ask a refugee facing years of displacement and heartless bureaucracy. Ask someone who doesn’t have clean water. Ask someone who has been colonized. Ask a mother whose child was killed by the police, knee on his throat, unable to breathe. Ask school children who have been shot. Ask those with bombs dropping on them. I could go on and on. Get too mired in the details, and that arc in the graph starts to look pretty jagged and might even be heading downwards.

In 2018, Mychal Denzel Smith wrote about the context for Dr. King’s famously hopeful characterization of history. According to Smith, King’s “use of the quote is best understood by considering his source material. ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’ is King’s clever paraphrasing of a portion of a sermon delivered in 1853 by the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker.” King abbreviated Parker, who said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” This is a statement of hope, of faith, not of fact.

Oh, how I wish it was fact. Again, too bad for me. Too bad for all of us. Wishing something is going to be doesn’t make it so.

A dear friend of mine looks adversity in the eye and says, “Onwards!” I hear her voice at times like this. “Onwards!” Time only moves forward. Maybe there’s a simpler way to look at recovery. Cicero said, “Where there is life, there is hope.” I can stick with that for now.