We're living inside a single paragraph of a much longer book, and judging the whole story by it
The whole world is shivering with corona fever. The story goes that someone, somewhere in China, ate a bat and caught it — and from that one small spark, the fever caught like wildfire, jumping continents and oceans until it had wrapped itself around the entire planet. Governments are responding as though the survival of the human species itself is on the line. It's almost enough to make you wonder whether some random dinosaur, a few million years back, once ate a bat too.
A world gone quiet and suspicious
Streets and public squares that used to be full are empty now. Most people are shut inside their own homes. When two people do happen to cross paths, they eye each other with a wariness that wasn't there before — as if the stranger might be hiding a blade. Items on shop shelves that we once wanted to reach out and touch, just for the pleasure of holding them, are now treated like unexploded mines — approach with care, or not at all.
The world has changed shape in a matter of weeks. If we all manage to come out the other side of this, it won't be the same world we left.
But every story needs its darkest chapter
And when we do come out — we'll have a story worth telling. One with heroes and villains in it, suspense, love, tragedy, and triumph, all woven together. Right now it feels like nothing but darkness, hopelessness, and despair. But as the monks of the East like to remind us: this too will pass.
We spend most of our lives chasing completeness, chasing a sense that things are finally whole and finished — and we suffer whenever we don't find it. What we miss, in that chase, is that it's the incomplete moments — the messy, unfinished, in-between ones — that get stitched together into the beautiful whole, once enough time has passed to see the stitching.
The paragraph isn't the book
Pick up a novel and read just one sentence, or one paragraph, without the rest of the story around it — and your chest tightens. It feels anxious, incomplete, unresolved. But finish the whole book, and something shifts: the novel reveals itself as beautiful, whole, complete. And only then do you see that the very sentence that felt so unbearable on its own was never a flaw in the story. It was necessary. Indispensable. Exactly where it needed to be.
We're standing inside one such sentence right now. We just haven't finished the book yet.