Quarantine imposes a discipline.  One has time to attend to important, the most important tasks, which otherwise we have put off because we were so busy, our schedule so full.  Now, there is no schedule.  I have in mind the salutary duty of taking stock, of a backward look to see where one has come.  What have our efforts amounted to?  Am I satisfied, at least to some extent with what has been accomplished?

When a small business owner closes down a business, a backward look of reflection is compelled because there will not be another day, another shot at “getting it right.”  A lot of such businesses are closed under the imposition of our social distancing, our bid to slow the coronavirus propagation through our population.  What does the future hold for those businesses, for the owners, for the employees who earned their livelihoods in those enterprises?

There are no clear answers.

So, I offer this tune as apt for the self reflection, your consideration of the meaning of your own life, for what you’d like to mean, — going forward.  Bonnie Raitt sings this John Prine song, as the anthem of reflection that it is.  The images, the metaphors work as touchstones to open the heart to compassion, to kindness for one’s self in the song’s story arc, which is indeed a prayer.

Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go

Angel From Montgomery

by Bonnie Raitt

I am an old woman
Named after my mother
My old man is another
Child that’s grown old

If dreams were thunder
And lightning was desire
This old house woulda burnt down
A long time ago

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go

When I was a young girl
Well I had me a cowboy
He weren’t much to look at
Just a free ramblin’ man
But that was a long time
And no matter how I tried
Those years just flow by
Like a broken down dam

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go

There’s flies in the kitchen
I can hear them there buzzin’
And I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today
But how the hell can a person
Go to work in the mornin’
And come home in the evenin’
And have nothin’ to say

Make me an angel
That flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
Of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this livin’
Is just a hard way to go

written by John Prine