So preoccupied are we by the pandemic (and its seemingly unrelieved fortunes) that the monthly alteration of the calendar almost went unnoticed today. But the awakening of springtime with the progress of the season is determined to render its own evolution in spite of the ignorance. Though no one dares predict what is to come it is impossible not to succumb to nature’s timetable and at least hope for a customary turn-around from a harsh though insidious winter. The universality of the virus contamination heightens what for some is traditionally little more than a poetic eclipse. Will we indeed have anything other by which to remember springtime this year?

My constitutional bicycle ride this morning was along the paved roadways not the gravel pathway of the former railway right-of-way. I ventured instead across the MacLan Bridge to the other side of town where we used to live, past St. Paul’s Anglican Church, parallel to the River and then up the hill. As might be expected the assault from the lower reaches of the Mississippi River approaching the dome of the municipal water tower was more strenuous than along the predominantly flat railway right-of-way. There was as well a cold westerly wind which put my blazing red Patagonia shell to the test – in peculiar contrast to my exposed limbs beneath the old black Champion athletic wear made in El Salvador (a place with its own history of affliction).

The conviction to perform one’s daily habits is as much compulsory as gratifying. There may even be the danger of performing by rote in the face of obscured challenges. I do however appear to have survived the incline and the bluster. As was later more apparent when I afterwards drove my car to the car wash in Stittsville and then ambled along the rolling and winding country roadways through Renfrew County, White Lake and the Township of Pakenham, the search for perfection is forever obstructed by the competing and compelling details of life. Whether by nature or by the insistence of spirited intellectual prowess I have resolved to absorb within the scope of my escapades the blunt and common ingredients which attend the larger picture, much as we instinctively tolerate microbial infection of the corpus. Rather than confess the imperfection of life I shall acknowledge its impenetrable variety.

It repeatedly occurs that just getting there is the ideal perfection. The secret lies in the etymology -specifically the “ficere” allusion – like the Nike adage, “Just do it!“.