It flew to a branch and stayed. It was a bird, judging by its silhouette, a common starling, and when it didn’t move, I asked myself, does it feel ill, coronavirus, or did it come here to die? I was relaxed, with time to observe. It didn’t move, but bobbed with the branch in the wind.
Where do birds go when they die? You seldom see bird corpses, so I watched this bird for ten minutes, conjecturing about the short life of a bird. A sudden gust of wind tore its silhouette apart, revealing two overlapping dead oak leaves, and my mental sallies came apart.
We construct mental castles from the reality around us, but I think I’ve put coronavirus down correctly. Sure, it’s infected a tiger in the Bronx Zoo, but I know how to deal with it now. Not everything the mind constructs is reality.
Civilization 