row your boat

by Rain Trueax

Row row row your boat

gently down the stream

merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

life is but a dream.

Everybody knows the melody or maybe not younger generations but it is well known to older ones. It is credited to Eliphalet Oram Lyte, who is cited as its composer in the 1881 New York publication The Franklin Square Song Collection. It is thought the words have been around much longer.

It came back to me because of a book we are reading-- The Dude and the Zen Master

As the new year began, we started something new for us. We would read aloud for a bit from a book. The first one was The Happiness Equation, which took us to March when we began the book I linked here. Reading aloud has been kind of a neat way to begin our day. In the case of this one, it's been particularly good with what has happened to the world with the black swan, which seemed to come from out of nowhere and has impacted all of life.

So the children's song has fit so well with what we're going through as a people and us individually. The idea is that when you row a boat down a stream you are never in the exact same place no matter how many times you do it. When the way you have gone down the stream isn't working anymore, you change your methods. It is how life has to be and a very apropos reminder with what Novel Covid-19 has done to what we all regarded as normal life.

Unless you've been living in a cave, you've been bombarded by stories about the virus. What to do? Who to blame? When people are looking for whose fault it is, mostly I see them coming up with whoever they blamed before this began. Some blame whoever isn't sufficiently terrified as after all, fear is always a tool to use when things go wrong, isn't it! Of course, we are also finding those seeking to use what's happening as a way to gain power or get through some policy they wanted all along. 

To me, the blame game or the fear emotion will not help. Maybe nothing will get us back to where we were-- but we are going down the stream and new shores beckon. Life is all about that and about how we react to what we are faced. 

We kind of have had a golden age for humans in terms of so many old diseases being eradicated or tamed by vaccinations or better cleaning habits. It hasn't been all that many years of humans feeling they could control their environment. I grew up when polio was a scourge each summer. My mother was born before antibiotics had been discovered. I think most of us have thought of plagues as something from the past and they have been but also a part of human existence-- a pandemic is basically a plague 10 of the Worst Pandemics in History.

Flu, just the ordinary kind, kills many Americans every year. People get the flu shots yearly and hope it will protect them. They say the one this year is especially effective at 45%. In other words, it doesn't protect totally.

More than 40 years ago, I had my last flu shot because I began having a bad reaction to them. I'd get sick for days and with the last one, I had a lump in my arm from the vaccination site that lasted months. I've had to do what they are telling us all to do-- avoid crowds, wash my hands often, and stay away from sick people-- or try to. I rowed my boat responsibly and only got the flu once in all those years. Not much fun but not worse than the last shot had been. 

Ironically, I was able to have other vaccinations, like for pneumonia, etc. I have thought maybe, after all those years, that I could again have a flu shot. I think I'll save that chance for the vaccination for coronavirus with the hope my response to it will be like to the whooping cough/tetanus vaccination-- nothing. That's a year off though-- at the best.

They are thinking that maybe an earlier treatment for malaria or ebola might have promise in testing with the coronavirus. It has in the few they have used it on. At least that they could try sooner than something brand new as they know it's safe for humans. Production though would have to really be ramped up to do much good soon enough. And would it work for enough people? What about side effects? On and on the questions go.

Lots of thoughts are out there on this virus. It might be that this one has been around longer than we knew. Maybe when people thought they had the flu, it was this with an extended cough or shortness of breath. Some may have had such a mild case they didn't think anything about it or thought it was the regular flu. 

Flu isn't like that for everyone as I know all too well. My grandmother's brother died, as a young man, in the 1918 flu. My mom and her sisters were children, got it , and recovered. My grandmother nursed them all but never got it. Much of the time, there is no seeming logic to disease. 

Putting together what I now know, I think my mother died from the regular flu. She called to tell us she was sick. I asked should she see the doctor. She adamantly said no. It was just the flu. I had been pretty sure that at 85, Mom also had congestive heart disease. It had not been diagnosed because she didn't go to doctors more than she had to but the dark bruises seemed an indicator to me. She died in her own bed not knowing she was seriously ill. I think the flu was enough to carry her over. It's what old age is like with a lot of illnesses including this one.

So, we will do what we can to avoid getting this virus as we row our boat down the stream and accet that sometimes things work out one way and sometimes another. Bolster our immune system and do all we can to keep fear a long way from us as it doesn't help in this situation. When we feel it overcoming us, lots of deep breaths-- and sometimes a good cry is in order.

All images from Stencil