Time for a lesson from Shinpei Yoshimura and Yuma Hashimoto: You can partially induce optimism by having pessimistic people—well, people with mild dysphoria, that is—imagine a positive future. Of course, there’s always a caveat. Believe it or not, there’s a potential downside to too much optimism.
 
As the researchers write, “…induced optimism provides a potential to cause both an overestimation of desirable information and underestimation of undesirable information….”* That’s the problem everyone faces in handling the any negative emotions in self or others under the circumstances of a continuing threat, such as a war or pandemic.
 
Nevertheless, I prefer optimism over chronic pessimism. What about you? Find yourself wallowing in self-pity or associating with negative people? Try inducing a bit of optimism. Every present is a pathway to multiple futures. Why focus on the negative ones except in positive ways to thwart their occurrence?    
 
Yoshimura, S., Hashimoto, Y. The effect of induced optimism on the optimistic update bias. BMC Psychol 8, 28 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-020-0389-6

DAY 1
“Folks, we’re here at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to see what scientists anticipate from their effort to hit an asteroid with DART, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Launched last year, the spacecraft is about to strike the satellite asteroid of Didymos, which is in a near-Earth orbit. DART will hit the asteroid’s companion called Didymoon at a speed of 6.6 kilometers per second, or about 4 miles per second. It’s hoped that the collision will change Didymoon’s orbit enough for the scientists here to measure the change.*
 
“So, why do we want to fire an object into Didymoon. Well, the whole idea began several decades ago when scientists began to consider what might happen if an asteroid were to hit Earth. Would it wipe out civilization? Cause worldwide extinction as happened 65 million years ago when an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs? Could an Earth-bound asteroid be deflected?
 
“DART will give us an answer to that question. It’s what we have seen in movies like Armageddon and Deep Impact, the idea that we can save ourselves from an asteroid. After about a year’s journey to catch Didymos and Didymoon, DART will hit the little moon today.
 
“Here’s Dr. Tané Remington whose been at the forefront of the planning for this mission. Dr. Remington, what do you think you’ll accomplish today when DART hits Didymoon?”
 
“Well, Charles, as you know, this is just an experimental phase to test whether or not it is possible to move an asteroid by hitting it with a spacecraft. We’ve looked at other methods of deflecting one, such as the ideas we’ve seen as fictionalized versions in the movies like Armageddon. We have some pretty sophisticated software modeling this. It’s a good field test, but it will take a while to assess its effectiveness.”
 
Day 2
“Dr. Remington has reported that DART impacted Didymoon yesterday evening at 8:07 Eastern, completing its 11 million kilometer or almost 7 million-mile journey. There he is now. Dr. Remington, Dr. Remington, a word, please.”
 
“Charles, yes, of course.”
 
“Was the test successful? Were you able to divert the asteroid?”
 
“Well, as I said yesterday, it will take some time to assess the results. The impact was only designed to move the asteroid by less than one percent of its orbit.”
 
“What if it doesn’t work?”

“Well, we would never know the efficacy of crashing a spacecraft into a Near Earth Object to move it unless we try. We can do all the modeling we want, but the true test comes in the field, or, should I say, in space.”
 
“You’ve spent a lot of money in this project. When will Americans know that the effort has been worth the expense, worth the sacrifice of materials and tax-supported hours?”
 
“Charles, Americans need to be patient. Science doesn’t work on the schedule of the impatient. It isn’t just a matter of ‘See we have a problem. Why hasn’t the government solved it yet?’ It isn’t as though we had vast stockpiles of asteroid-crashers and the rockets to deliver them.”
 
“Oh! Right. But there are many Near Earth Objects that could hit Earth. Remember that thing that hit Russia a while back. Came out of nowhere. Shouldn’t we have had something in place to intercept it, to kill it before it injured so many people and damaged infrastructure?”
 
“Charles, let me give you a situation, and you tell me how you would handle it: Say you go to the bakery at 10:00 a.m. and ask for glazed donuts, but the baker says he doesn’t have any more donuts because several office groups bought them for parties. Now, what are you going to do? Demand the baker immediately give you donuts he doesn’t have? You realize that he wouldn’t necessarily have known that several offices were going to need dozens of glazed donuts on the same day, don’t you? The parties pretty much ‘came out of nowhere,’ so as prepared as he was for ordinary business, he couldn’t have anticipated the need for making extra donuts just so you could have one when you wanted one.”
 
“Um…”
 
“Think back two years ago, to 2020, Charles. Donuts are ventilators. Donuts are asteroid-killing spacecraft. Understand? And we won’t know if the test to alter the vector of the asteroid works until we know it works. Nothing is immediate in careful science. And when we are trying something new for the first time, we have to experiment. Maybe we’ll need another modification on the next DART. When you think about what we have accomplished, you should be able to give some credit, not that trying means succeeding, but there’s no succeeding without trying or experimenting. And as far as having extra asteroid-killers on hand, know that once we figure out how to handle a single asteroid emergency, we will be better equipped to handle such emergencies as they threaten.”
 
“Um…”
 
“Sorry, Charles, that’s all the time I have to talk. I want to check to see whether what we tried is working, and that’s taking all my time right now.”

"Well, there you have it ladies and gentlemen, another government official who won't come clean about what's going on. Is this another coverup? Yet another scandal? Stay tuned because after the break, we're going to get responses from our experts, and we will hear from the candidates for President to see what they would do if an unexpected asteroid threatened Earth with yet another 'existential' event like global warming."
 
https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart

The USA now has an operational space surveillance radar site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. According to a report by Sandra Erwin, the U.S. Space Force located in Huntsville, Alabama, can use the $1.5 billion facility to track 26,000 objects in low orbits. Called the Space Fence, the Space Surveillance Network “is revolutionizing the way we view space by providing timely, precise orbital data…[on threatening objects].”* Erwin says the system can track an object the size of a marble. Now, no big deal if a marble-size object falls out of orbit to head at high speed toward you. It will burn up in the atmosphere, and even if it doesn’t, chances are it would land in the ocean. I guess the only reason to keep track of a space marble is to protect rockets, satellites, and the International Space Station. Those objects and astronauts would be jeopardized by a collision with a marble.
 
Stream of consciousness: “How big’s a marble?” I asked myself, “I mean how big is it actually. I remember having them and playing marbles with cousins and friends in my childhood, but I don’t think I ever pulled out a caliper to measure one’s diameter.” So, I looked up marbles on the ever-ready Web that we all use to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Seems that marbles come in different sizes, but there’s a standard used in official marble championships. And then I thought, “What would it take to track a marble a little larger than the standard game piece, say a full inch in diameter, from a point on Earth’s surface. What does it take to see a marble far away?”
 
Then I got to thinking, “What’s that formula for determining the seconds, minutes, or degrees of arc for an astronomical object?” And that led me to some trig, and that made me think, “I don’t want to do this because a marble-size object 100 miles away would look like a marble-size object 100 miles away, really very tiny, too tiny for me to see. I don’t think I could see one on the other end of a football field, even if it were suspended on a string from the goal post’s crossbar.” Guess what next occurred to me? Yeah. Viruses.
 
The Hubble Space Telescope can magnify at 5,760 power. So, conceivably, if I aimed the Hubble from the ground at a space marble, I could make it appear 5,760 larger; that would make the one-inch marble seem to be 5,760 inches, or 480 feet, in diameter if it were against the telescope lens [too large to take in without panning]. Consider that my math is suspect at best, but the Hubble has a focal length of 57.6 meters and a collecting area of 4.525 square meters. Anyway, and probably wrongly, if you divide the collecting area by the focal length, it should equal the diameter of the marble divided by the distance to the marble. Or conversely, if you saw a marble in orbit through the Hubble, you could guess its diameter by multiplying the distance to the object times its apparent height and dividing by the focal length.
 
As I was saying without all that unnecessary math stuff, a faraway marble would be visible through the Hubble, and a closeup marble would seem huge. And, if I consider how small viruses are, I might need that kind of magnification to see them. In fact, images of viruses in journals and biology books and on websites show viruses usually magnified 1,000 or more times by scanning electron microscopes. Some images run up to Hubble-like magnifications. **
 
Wondering, I thought further, “What does it take to magnify a story of danger significantly enough so that people pay attention to their level of jeopardy? I mean, look, back in January we were getting word that a virus was wreaking havoc on the people of Wuhan, China. Then it began to spread. Soon it was devastating South Korea, Italy, and Iran. And yet, the danger itself appeared to be too small for college students or the mayor of New Orleans to cancel celebrations like spring break or the Mardi Gras—even after the virus had entered the country. Golly! [not the word I actually thought] How big does something have to become before people pay attention?”
 
And then memory of Hurricane Katrina came to mind. I guess the people in New Orleans, hearing that a potential category V storm was bearing down on them, its images revealed on TV weather forecasts, thought, ‘No, not big enough in my view.’ And then in the aftermath of the tragic storm that damaged so much and took so many lives, those who survived looked back under the magnification of their own foolhardy and inept actions, and started to seek scapegoats. Under Katrina and under Covid-19, the scapegoats were presidents. Magnification in hindsight is a magnificent process for thwarting responsibility. So, even though there were warnings about limiting gatherings, neither the college students nor the mayor of New Orleans took decisive action to limit crowds. And now, at the time of this writing, Louisiana has a rapidly spreading Covid-19.
 
Not that not heeding warnings, even magnified ones, seems to be uncommon: The young are especially adept at ignoring the wisdom of their elders, thus the not too infrequent tales of college students succumbing to alcohol poisoning at fraternity parties or falling from a hotel balcony during spring break.
 
“Ironic,” I continued to think. “How is it that in an age of news magnification that so few take the news of a threat like a hurricane or a pandemic so lightly? Could 80,000 sick Wuhanese with a 4% death rate not be big news? Could a significant number of deaths in a Seattle care home not be magnification enough for everyone to see? I guess it doesn’t matter how much anyone magnifies a danger, it will pass unnoticed. If Mars were as close as Hubble makes it look, it would appear to be no farther away than the distance between London and Los Angeles. But, I’m guessing that even if some saw red Mars hanging just about 6 or 7 thousand miles above them, they wouldn’t pay attention.”
 
The network of communication in the twenty-first century is the equivalent of the Space Surveillance Network, but what good is it if, in identifying and magnifying, no one bothers to look? If that space marble heads toward the ISS, NASA will move it to avoid the collision. Makes sense to do so, right? But when the virus-marble headed toward the spring break beaches and Bourbon Street, no one thought to move. Amazing the damage a small object like a marble or a virus can do. Even more amazing is that some in their hubris would stand in place as either approached. Oh! Well. Perspective is everything, I suppose. When he looked at a kid named David holding a pebble, Goliath perceived the threat to be both small and distant, but I guess it took only a pebble to bring down the mighty giant.
 
*Erwin, Sandra. Space Fence surveillance radar site declared operational. 28 Mar 2020. SpaceNews. Online at https://spacenews.com/space-fence-surveillance-radar-site-declared-operational/   Accessed March 28, 2020.
 
**https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=sz&hsimp=yhs-001&type=type7094303-sv7 dGFnVTExMjgyNTgtc2VhcmNoc2VjdXJl-c019059c6b2431d574b15685d1d3c3e0&param1=20674&param3=145&p=images%20of%20viruses&param2=eyJzZXJwR2VvUmVkIjoieWVzIiwiZXh0VGFncyI6W10sImJyb3dzZXJOYW1lIjoiQ2hyb21lIiwiYnJvd3NlclZlcnNpb24iOiI4MC4wLjM5ODcuMTIyIiwiZXh0VmVyc2lvbiI6Imhvc3RlZCIsImV4dE5hbWUiOiJTZWFyY2ggU2VjdXJlIFByaW1lIiwiY2xpY2tTcmMiOiJ5aHNfc3luIiwiY2hyb21lU3RvcmVJZCI6ImdpaG9mZ2xubnBpZGdhbWpva2FhZWtwamhpZGVkaGVkIiwiRGlzdHJpYnV0aW9uX0RhdGUiOiIyMDE5LTA2LTAzVDAxOjU0OjQ4LjAwMDAwMFoiLCJkb21haW4iOiJ3d3cuc2VhcmNoc2VjdXJlcHJpbWUuY28iLCJvclNyYyI6Im9tbmlib3giLCJoZmV3IjpudWxsLCJyZXZfc3JjIjoiMSIsImlzUmVsZWFzZSI6IjAiLCJ3cmtyIjoxfQ&fromworker=1
 

So, get this. For years I explained a plane’s lift on the basis of the Bernoulli Theorem. It made sense, I thought. The rounded top of the wing means that air passing over it has a longer distance to travel than the air passing beneath the flat underside. Topside, the air flows faster to meet at the back of the wing the air passing by the flat underside. Faster flow, lower pressure, approaching a vacuum. And you know how Mother Nature abhors a vacuum. So, the wing rises (pushed from below?) to fill the relative void. The plane gets lift. Or so I thought.  And then I picked up the February 2020 issue of Scientific American and read “The Enigma of Aerodynamic Lift” by Ed Regis.* Now, I’m not so sure.
 
Regis points out that if lift comes from a lower pressure over the curved airfoil that occurs because the air there must speed up to meet the air passing below the wing, then how is that a pilot can fly upside down? Good point. Brain explodes: Explanation based on Bernoulli Theorem now cast into doubt. What have I been saying all these years? How many students have I misled? And how did I get in all those multi-ton sky machines to fly blissfully so high above the ground?
 
Flying upside down (not sure why anyone would want to do that) is an airshow trick of long standing not recommended for commercial jumbo jets, of course. As many times as I have seen the inverted flight occur either in person or on film, it never occurred to me to question how the plane keeps its lift when the curved part of the wing is on the underside.
 
And that makes me wonder what else I never thought to question, not just the physics of flight or of any other Newtonian manifestation of forces in action, but also the actions of everyday people. What have I been missing? How have I allowed myself only partial explanations?
 
Possibly, living with partial or incomplete explanations is how we humans get through each day. After all, wouldn’t irrefutable explanations require extensive research and experimentation? And even if we did such inductive work, couldn’t we argue that Euclidean deduction is the only guarantee that we truly know what we say we know? We could run ten experiments with the same results, as you know, and not find out until we run the eleventh that we were wrong. I think of Jane Goodall, who stayed just a little longer in the field beyond her scheduled time to leave when she saw chimpanzees acting like a violent mob in an attack on a chimpanzee from a different family. Goodbye the notion of peaceful primates. Induction? I know we like to use it, filling ourselves with convincing anecdotes, but there’s always the chance that one more event will contradict the preceding events. No, science is right to frequently cast its lot with deduction.
 
Whether or not I’ll ever understand what keeps an airplane or a frisbee in flight is irrelevant. I can try all the alternatives, such as one that suggests the airfoil pushes down on the air below it. For me, right now, I’m at the “Who cares as long as it works” stage. I’ve been in planes; they’ve stayed in the air until the pilot made them not stay in the air. I was happy with my Bernoulli Theorem explanation when I glanced out the window at the curved surface of the wing.
 
What is more relevant here is that I learned how limited, how inductive, my knowledge has been. How many aspects of life have I believed I’ve understood right-side up without ever accounting for the possibility that I’ve been seeing things upside down?
 
*Vol. 322, Number 2. Pp. 44-51.

These interesting times might just put the period at the end of the sentence: In the worst of times the worst appear.
 
Couple of instances: Young people coughing on or licking grocery store products and posting videos of their actions online during a pandemic; the Russian Internet Research Agency, Chinese agents, computer savvy psychopaths intent on spreading false information, and other entities posting messages of hate; and some Hollywood celebrities wishing a coronavirus death on conservatives.
 
Yes, there appears to be an inherent evil that will out itself when lives are in jeopardy. That there are so many who wish for or perpetrate evil outcomes doesn’t speak well of the optimistic view that humans are inherently good.
 
That begs the question: Is all good a matter of training? Is the purpose of ethical principles simply to put a check on inherent evil?
 
What do you think?

Isaac Newton went home when the plague threatened. In that year of isolation, he reinvented the way we see the physical world. He invented the Calculus. It has been called the Annus Mirabilis, the “wonderful year” or the “miracle year.”
 
And now you, quarantined as you are because of Covid-19, also have an opportunity. This probably won’t last a year, but in whatever duration it does last, you have the opportunity to devise your own “wonderful time,” call it your “Tempus Mirabilis.”
 
There will be those who simply complain, and there will be those who will become to some degree, even a small one, the twentieth-first century version of Isaac Newton. Your choice.

“A worm? A worm? You think I’m related to a worm.”
 
“Well, Ikaria is pretty old and it has what you have, a head on one end and a butt on the other with a body that is bilaterally symmetrical along its length.* Yeah, I’d say you started out as a worm, well, if not you, then your kind, the animals, I mean.”
 
“Insulting! I’m a sophisticated organism whose kind has conquered the planet. Surely, we humans, nay, all animals, can trace the origin of our ‘animalness’ to some more complex creature.”
 
“No, Ikaria is it, at least as far as we know. Then, of course, along came Myllokunmingia, maybe the earliest vertebrate and Haikouichthys, both with notochords and simple vertebrate body styles.” **
 
“Okay, I get it. My ancient ancestors appear to have been rather common worm-like creatures. So, what?”
 
“Humble roots, my man, humble roots. And a connection to life-forms of all kinds. And here we are, wanting to assert ourselves as individuals, and the moment a pandemic comes along, we realize that ‘Hey. We’re all human; we’re all related. We’re all capable of passing along a virus or bacterium because we generally are susceptible to the same kinds of illnesses as a consequence of being related.’ There’s no getting around it.”
 
“Yeah. I suppose I see your point. You gonna make another?”

“What do you want me to say?”
 
“That because we see a deep relationship among all humans, living and dead, maybe we should realize that we aren’t as ‘individual’ as we think we are in our hubris. Maybe our humble roots alone, and not some pandemic, should be enough to warrant practiced humility and compassionate relationships. Maybe the common roots give us a sense that we’re all in this together, even when we are separate--and especially when we are separated.”
 
“Couldn’t have said it better.”
 
*Evans, Scott D. Ian V Hughes, James G. Gehling, and Mary L. Droser. 23 Mar 2020. Discovery of the oldest bilaterian from the Ediacaran of South Australia. PNAS, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2001045117  Online at https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/03/17/2001045117
And, Phys.org. Ancestor of all animals identified in Australian fossils. 23 Mar 2020 online at https://phys.org/news/2020-03-ancestor-animals-australian-fossils.html   Accessed March 24, 2020.
   
**Wikipedia. Myllokunmingia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myllokunmingia  A good enough overview of the critter. You could, if you so desire, also look up Haikouchthys ercaicunensis. I’m not trying to make you a paleontologist, just an advanced form of vertebrate whose knot of neurons understands that humans, for all their differences, aren’t fundamentally very different and that little makes this point more clear than a pandemic.

During the SARS Covid-19 pandemic all of us have heard the standard advice: Distance yourself, wash your hands, don’t sneeze on others or walk through a sneeze cloud, don’t panic, stop stressing the supply chain, and, for everyone’s sake, stay inside. Staying inside is probably wise, but golly, difficult. Even whales can’t stay inside the ocean, jumping out, or breaching, sometimes frequently. No doubt the young among us will have the most difficult time staying inside. And the old among us will no doubt grow a bit pudgy without those long walks, bicycle rides, or jogs. Surely, there’s a compromise, and, if you’re new to this site, some sort of lesson in breaching, in getting outside.
 
First off, whales breach only temporarily. Gravity sees to that. So, it takes great energy to breach as an article by Alexander J. Werth and Charles L. Lemon of Hampden-Sydney College reveals. Werth and Lemon report on a study by Paolo Segre et al. on the energy required to breach. “A 15-meter humpback whale…can expend as much energy as a 60-kilogram human would during a marathon…Segre et al. therefore contend that a breach may represent the ‘most expensive burst maneuver’ in all of nature, pushing the boundaries of muscular performance and providing an honest signal of a whale’s general health.”*.
 
Yeah. Those people you see running through the park and exercising are generally saying, especially if they are young and single, “Hey, look at me. I’m a catch because I’m healthy.” Or as Werth and Lemon report, “One juvenile humpback breached 52 times I just over four hours.” And that’s probably why thousands of spring breakers left the safe confines of their Covid-19-free homes to jump on beaches. Just the young doing what the young do, right? Showing off and simultaneously expressing through some breaching and beaching.
 
But the young aren’t, as you know, the only ones who have a desire to breach. Admit it, staying in the home waters is difficult. Now you know what your pet fish experience when they run into the aquarium glass and find themselves dependent on the supply chain of fish food flakes. “Oh, if only I could breach.” So, even the most mature of adults can feel the need for some breaching, even some that would require far less energy than running a marathon.
 
So, if there’s a safe isolated space to breach, by all means breach. But there is one more type of breaching, one that is especially needed during this time of 24/7 yak-yak yada-yada stuff by TV commentators seeking a reason to justify their jobs while others sit idly and when they are not saying “Social distance, and wash your hands” or “It’s Trump’s fault,” as they look for a scapegoat or for political gain. And that other kind of breaching is an intellectual one. Maybe staying in the aquarium gives you a chance to explore your inner world to find that it is larger than you imagined. This pandemic event gives you a time to explore what you might previously have left unobserved or unlearned.
 
Let me switch from ocean to galaxy to make the point. Seems that we live in a bigger fish bowl than we thought. The Milky Way, according to a new measurement by Alis Deason and colleagues at Durham University, is not a mere 100,000 light-years across as older astronomy texts commonly state. Rather, it is 1.9 million light-years, especially when one takes into account the galaxy’s dark matter.** And its disk of stars, the visible, ordinary matter, is a wide 120,000 light-years in diameter. Imagine, ever since Hubble discovered that we live in an island universe called the Milky Way, subsequent astronomers determined its diameter at 20,000 fewer light-years. Seems, as I wrote above, you have farther to swim till you hit the astronomical aquarium glass. In other words, there is more inside and the inside is bigger than you might have previously thought.
 
You have more to explore before you need to breach. Your personal ocean and galaxy are big.  
 
*Werth, Alexander J. and Charles L. Lemon. Animal Behavior: Whale breaching says it loud and clear. eLife. 11 Mar 2020. DOI: 10.7554eLife.55722,  Online at https://elifesciences.org/articles/55722  Accessed March 23, 2020.
And Segre, Paolo et al. Energetic and physical limitations on the breaching performance of large whales. 11 Mar 2020 same site.
 
**Croswell, Ken. Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last. ScienceNews. 23 Mar 2020. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/astronomers-have-found-edge-milky-way-size  Accessed 23 Mar 2020.

Many companies, particularly in a society of computer and smart phone users, employ a process called auto-renew to seamlessly tie one cycle of financial obligation to another. It works on the one hand to the benefit of company and lazy customer and on the other hand to the customer’s detriment during forgetful moments. “Shoot! I meant to cancel that subscription, but now it’s too late. Oh, well, next year.” When one has a standing account affixed to a credit card or bank account, such forgetting is easy to do. At the same time, the process breeds in the customer an unconscious feeling of belonging, a bit like George Wendt’s character Norm affixed to the same barstool in the TV series Cheers. Each time Norm enters the bar, the occupants yell, “NORM!” as Norm walks to his regular place at the bar. Yes, auto-renewal is like that. We’re all “Norms” when we use it, and the company is eager to shout our name as we reenter its service or financial commitment. As in the lyrics to the show's theme song, the auto-renewal system is a bar "where everyone knows your name." 
 
Many are content with a life like Norm’s, that is, a predictable life, even in ignorance of a specific and familiar name. Admit it. You have your favorite chair, bar or restaurant, vacation spot, hotel, or pillow. And, of course, your favorite individuals or groups who auto-renew their relationships. Once we’ve given out that personality card number, the whole social system becomes automatic, and we are suffused with a sense of security and, sometimes, complacency. Auto-renewal takes a conscious effort to cancel. 
 
To cancel, we say, “I’m tired of what I do. I want a change for no other reason than I just don’t want to renew. I want to try something different.” But, saying that is easier than stopping the auto-renewal process. So, we go on eating what we shouldn’t be eating in amounts we shouldn’t eat, following some addiction or habit, or seeing the world from the same barstool. Occasionally, we try another barstool or even another bar and forego the auto-renewal process. And when we do decide not to renew, we discover something about ourselves we either did not know or long forgot. And in the discovery or memory, we undergo a feeling of insecurity—at least temporarily.
 
Auto-renewal, once established, is difficult for us to stop, but once we stop one auto-renewal, we often sign up for another because a life of constantly changing barstools requires a character trait difficult to maintain: The ability to find personal security in the midst of insecurity. 
 
As the world temporarily halts the auto-renewal process because of the Covid-19 pandemic and as the bars lose their occupants and the barstools stand empty of their familiar occupants, each person has an opportunity to learn something new about life, to see from a different perspective, or to remember what was forgotten even in a bar where no one knows a name.  

Typical natural process: Winter storms over the Pacific generate large wave systems that, upon reaching a shoreline, gouge out sands, moving them off-beach. Beaches narrow. Gentler wave regimes in the summer, upon reaching a shoreline, push the sands beachward. Beaches widen with a richness of sands. Many people familiar only with a summertime beach would probably ask where the sands had gone if they were to see a wintertime beach.
 
So, beach sands undergo changes the way seasonal beltlines change in an inverse proportion, stomachs expanding during winter inactivity until the Nutrisystem food box arrives just a couple of months before beach season opens. We’ve lived the cycle of inverse relationship between beach width and stomach girth. We know the process is cyclic, but of recent beaches have remained wider than usual, economically speaking.
 
The wide beaches of a relatively affluent lifestyle remained largely unaffected by a seasonal change like the flu. Then, unexpectedly, the wintertime storm of Covid-19 churned the waves of luxurious satiety and turned them into beach-gouging surf. All too suddenly, the beach of life narrowed. Wintertime inactivity settled over the land and people. Outside opportunities thinned, and the beach vendors found themselves without beachgoers.
 
For a people accustomed to life on a seemingly eternal beach, the loss of sands has been rather psychologically devastating. Mostly because affluence breeds impatience. Who has time to wait for a natural process to restore the expected status quo?
 
As in all things finite on a tilted planet that inexorably passes from season to season, the cycle will right itself eventually. The beaches will return, possibly as early as midsummer. People will, as they have always done after the passing of a storm season, resume their lifestyle, maybe this time with a little more awareness that seasons, though inexorable, can be anomalous. Mild winters and cool summers can occur; rare storms occur. And with those unpredictable changes in seasonal patterns, the sands of life will shift unexpectedly the habits and patterns of a people with short memories. Only a few in 2020 are alive who were alive in 1918 during the storm of the Spanish Flu at the end of a devastating world war, both events having robbed shorelines of almost all sands. And those who were alive then were too young to remember some image of the narrowed beaches of that time. For those of us born in ensuing generations, the event is a mere point in history that we might know intellectually but not experience emotionally. As we know, the next generation always has difficulty understanding the lives of the preceding generation. Five generations after the Spanish Flu killed tens of millions around the world, only the historically astute understand; yet, even they can’t “feel” what it was like to come upon that once wide beach to discover it had disappeared.
 
Enjoy wide beaches when you can; and when they disappear, know that their return is inevitable.