Today Canada discovered its first two cases of the Covid variant that originated in the United Kingdom. A couple in Ontario were infected. They had “no known travel history, exposure or high-risk contacts”. Woh! How did that happen? The virus is so incredibly transmissible, defying normal reason.
The Earth is a big place. How exactly did Covid reach Samoa and Fiji in the mid-Pacific Ocean, Greenland and … Antarctica! On December 22, CTV News reported that “three dozen people have reportedly contracted Covid-19 at a Chilean research base in Antarctica, which for months was the only landmass untouched by the global pandemic.”
I wonder if anything else could go viral.
How about love?
Sometime in the 1980’s, I was crossing a parking lot in Lethbridge, Alberta. A woman of perhaps East Indian origin was walking towards me. As we got closer, she smiled and said “Hello.” I mean a real hello, one that said “I see who you are. I honour who you are.” Thirty some years later, she is still with me. Do you think a “little” gesture of contact like that could change the world? I do. What if each of us did the same thing for someone, with the same grandness of heart, only once in our remaining years? That’s a lot of loving hellos.
In virus talk, the R Number is “a way of rating coronavirus’s ability to spread. R is the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average.” If we want the virus to subside, the R Number needs to be less than 1.0.
I propose an L Number, a way of rating the ability of love to spread. Genuine smiles will do nicely. If for the rest of your life you aimed a lingering smile at two people rather than one, and if everyone else did the same, our L Number would be 2.0.
And a Lovedemic would take over the planet
