Answer:
As social distancing cut me off from my normal routine of basketball and tennis, I have started running instead. My route takes me to a park through which a shallow creek bends back and forth. Pennsylvania has had a lot of rain lately, though, so the water has run high, and now the creek murmurs and splashes as it passes over rocks.
Every time I hear it, I think of the closing lines from a poem, “The Real Work,” by Wendell Berry: “The mind that is not baffled is not employed. / The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
“Baffled,” in the next-to-last line, can mean perplexed, as when, in the first lines of the poem, Berry writes that only when we do not know what to do or which way to go do we discover “our real work” and “our real journey.” But it can also mean baffled in the sense of a baffle, or a device used to regulate or restrain the flow or passage of something, such as light, sound or, in this case, liquid. That sense proceeds into the final line, which asserts that we, like the stream, only come alive, only sing, when we encounter obstacles.
Thinking of these lines, especially the last one, I have, perhaps unsurprisingly, admittedly even a little predictably, hoped that this pandemic is the imposition that will lead us to our real work, the obstacle that, as Berry puts it, will finally make us sing.
