Corona feelings
"Spring is the carrot on my hook – and it only makes things worse"
© Aloha Hawaii / Shutterstock
Spring was a bright spot in the corona pandemic. But our editor tends to be frustrated. Spring feelings? What was that again?
When, after months of gray, the first blue struggles through the cloud cover and the sun carefully stretches out its rays, you can marvel at the influence of spring on people's minds year after year.
In Corona wording one would say these days: There is an exponential increase in our mood. The more light, the better the mood. Except that the formula somehow doesn't work out this year. Rather, it actually runs in the opposite direction. With the spring of 2021 I get frustrated.
That was different. Much was different once, you find yourself with the bills of a new age, before and after Corona. The coronavirus already existed a year ago. Nevertheless, the first signs of spring 2020 provided a glimmer of hope in the dark, you only needed this tiny spark to rekindle the positivity. With the sun everything will be fine again, with the summer this nasty little virus will disappear again, it will be fine. Ha! What did we laugh!
Feelings of spring or frustration?
Now it's spring again. And we have learned: It might solve a few, but unfortunately not all of our problems, especially not Corona, because my goodness, what we were naive last year. A year has passed and we are again or still in lockdown, the virus is again or still there, people are back or still not knowing what to do next, let alone politics.
Somehow the little certainty crept into the minds of many friends including me that everything would certainly get better with the weather. Until this milestone vanished again with the first rays of sunshine. I feel like a donkey, with a carrot on the hook, that has been plotting for a reward for 12 months that is slowly becoming rotten, so to speak. And as the carrot shrinks, I lose sight of my goal.
Spring shows me what I'm not allowed to do. Or want to. And at the same time he holds out what I could have in front of my nose. Normally we would now serve the first wine spritzers and Alster water, meet far too early for an ice cream in the garden and freeze bravely, die-hard people smell the first chance to pull out their Weber grills and yes, I would allow them even that. But there is neither wine nor ice cream nor sausages and even their tastes and smells slowly fade in our memories.
Spring seems to me this year like a fragrance that has not been smelled for a long time, but which reminds you of feelings of an almost forgotten time. Spring awakens a longing in me that reality will not match. Spring no longer makes me sad or angry, it fills me with emptiness. And spring has really never done that.
The marathon comparison lags
We are at a point in the pandemic that we have passed all the first times. This is dangerous. It is said that it takes a person 21 days to get used to a new situation. But in the last 365 days he was rarely offered the same conditions for three weeks at a time. The information situation about the coronavirus is changing so quickly that we are still lagging behind even after a year. Worse still, we're slowly giving up. We trot instead of sprinting, have a lame foot and a bruised knee and would like to lie on the edge of the race, stretch all limbs and discover that marathons are overrated. But it doesn't work. And would be kind of annoying if the goal is closer than ever.
Even the marathon comparison is slow, because it has at least a fixed duration, 42 kilometers. At 40 kilometers you may be tired, but you also know: 2 kilometers more, it won't get any more. Then that was it. Then you did it. Our goal, however, has been shifting backwards steadily for a year. What kilometer are we at right now? And how much longer do we have to?
I cannot answer that question. But if I take a deep breath, stop and look ahead in my spring void, I can still see my rotten carrot. But recently there have also been numerous vaccination posters lining the path. We don't know how long it will be, but what we do know is that it has a goal again.
Spring wasn't the milestone I was hoping for. But the summer, that's for sure. I hope.