On Good Friday, Christians mark the sufferings of Christ. This Good Friday morning, I sat in front of a blank computer screen thinking, “The computer died overnight. This is a dark time. Maybe it’s temporary. Push the ‘on’ switch, Donald. Okay, maybe it needs to be held in a bit longer. Shoot, still no screen. Wait, is it brightening? Yes, it’s coming back to life. What would I do if my only functioning computer died? Apple is closed for business, so going to the mall is out of the question during these quarantine days. Ah! There’s that little line with the slow light-sabre that shows resurrection. It’s back on. I’m bathed in the glow of my screen.”
 
And then I thought, “How foolishly petty I must be,” as I realized what day it was. And from that, I thought of those thousands who in the course of just a few recent weeks went from health to death, from light to darkness, and to the families who lost loved ones forever. Unlike my computer and the story of Christ, this contemporary story has no tangible resurrection for the victims of the pandemic, no 'on' button for loved ones to push. No, there’s a permanence here, and life has changed for the survivors.
 
One doesn’t have to be a Christian (I am, by the way) to learn a lesson about life from the sufferings of Christ and the Covid-19 victims. This is not your practice life, dear Reader. As you sit in front of your computer, recognize that the screen you use could at some time be infected by a virus, and the life you live could be similarly affected, the latter infection far worse than the former. That you currently have both a computer that works and a life to live should bring you some joy. Among your fellow seven billion humans are those who have neither a working monitor nor the health to use one that functions. If you can empathize with them, you might experience joy in what you have, not merely in your access to a computer—a device no one had not too long ago—but also in your access to consciousness, potential, and human interaction in some form.
 
When you do undergo your eventual resurrection from the tomb of quarantine, look with wonder on those others around you given the gift of rising into a new life. Look, too, with pity on those who will emerge into the world with bitterness because in their self-centered perspectives and in their egocentrism, they will not note that some never rose from the graves dug by a pandemic to enjoy the world again and to fulfill their potential.
 
If you undergo small sufferings and find yourself complaining, short-tempered, or mean-spirited, step back for a moment to see your life not in comparison with what it was but rather in light of what it can be in fulfilling your potential for good. Unless you are under dire threat, you aren’t in your quarantine being crucified. You aren’t suffering as much as your impatience wants you to believe. Will the post-pandemic world be different from the pre-pandemic world? Yes, of course, but it will be a world of your making. If my computer had become a permanently dark screen this morning, I would be temporarily cut off from posting a blog, but I could still put pencil to paper if I felt the need to write. The mechanism of communication would change, but the ability to communicate in alternative ways would remain. I could take joy in whatever endures. Small sufferings can heighten the joy in what we do have, in what we have not lost, and in the potential to adapt.
 
Christians live in the hope of their Resurrection, their personal Easter, but anyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, can also hope for and work toward a bright emergence from a dark time.  

Remember that oft-quoted passage from Dickens: “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times…”? All times are times of contrast. Today is no exception. Weigh this contrast:
 
1.General Terrence J. O’Shaughnessy, Commander of NORAD and USNORTHCOM, said this morning that the US military intercepted Russian planes wandering near American airspace. Obviously, the Russians, who tried something similar a few weeks ago with the same result, were trying out American response capabilities and timing in a process reminiscent of the Cold War. O’Shaughnessy, a capable leader with an entire country’s defense on the line, has the military ready for such emergencies. Simultaneously, he has the responsibility of overseeing the disastrous consequence of the pandemic, especially in his having to move medical resources rapidly in response to critical needs. He reported that when one NY hospital had trouble with its oxygen equipment, the military responded as rapidly as they did during the Russian plane intercept, sending doctors and vehicles to move patients in dire need to other facilities.
 
2.Unnamed. Anonymous. Who cares, anyway? Someone who complains because life as it was known and practiced pre-pandemic isn’t what it once was: Celebrities locked in mansions and millennials locked out of bars and restaurants? Complainers and fault-finders of all sorts? Scapegoaters with political agendas? Remember "Get over It" by the Eagles?  
 
When we look back, will we write, "They were the best of people; they were the worst of people"? The contrast: One guy acting fast to protect both Alaska and NY with an encompassing perspective that takes in a whole continent in contrast with another with a perspective limited by a mind that thinks an apartment, luxury condo, home, mansion, or neighborhood is the entire world. It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. 

Maps don’t show all of Earth’s details. They don’t show the all the details of anything. If they did, they would have scales like “one inch equals one inch.” Steven Wright has a joke about that. Maps with such scales would be the same size as the surfaces they portray; globes would be eight thousand miles in diameter.
 
No, maps give details germane to their purposes: Road maps, for example, show roads and the names of towns through which or by which they pass. Large scale maps give more details than small scale maps, with the former used for smaller areas than the latter. An architect's floor plan with proposed furniture emplacement in an apartment is a large scale map. In contrast, the smaller scale city map doesn't show apartment sinks, and an even smaller scale state map doesn't show city streets. Ironically, we use “large scale” and “small scale” to mean just the opposite when we speak of human activities and psychological perspectives.
 
As a center proposition of this website runs, people can use mental maps to understand and control their lives. Those numerous mental maps you hold dear are, like actual maps, also detail deficient. One reason is false memories. Another is imagination or embellishment. And yet another is forgetfulness. Test: Quick, recall all the details of your first bedroom, your first neighborhood, or your first trip. We don’t need all those details over the long term, so our brains selectively drop many of them.* No big deal. We retain what we believe will help us in “going back” mentally or physically. 
 
As we leave the crib and expand our world, we increase the number of maps and thus add more details to either recall or delete. And as we become more imaginative, we can even map fictional places, anticipated places, and analogous places. Expanding the number of cognitive maps is indicative of expanding experiences, including, of course, the maps of more numerous relationships that come with interactions.
 
In a time of worldwide quarantine, the personal world we map has shrunken in one way and expanded in another. On the one hand, our details are limited in large part to the small areas that we call homes and even mansions can become the cribs of the present. On the other hand, our details are limited by the number of pixels on our TVs, smart devices, and monitors. We can, of course, add books and other print media. Recall Emily Dickinson’s line, “There is no frigate like a book.” The point here is that the focus of mental mapping has changed in the midst of a pandemic. The large and small scales between which we bounce are different today from what they were yesterday. We can find ourselves seeing details in our homes, yards, or neighborhoods that we ignored or forgot under pre-pandemic conditions. We can also find ourselves adding virtual maps to our memories, implanting them in our brain’s place cells.
 
Itching to go out and re-explore and re-map the world you once freely traveled? Itching to find in retracing previous explorations those details of place and person you forgot? When the pandemic passes, you will have a new world to explore and map. That’s an exciting thought. In the next go-round, in your next emergence from the life of the crib, you will have the advantage of knowing how to explore. This time out you might find yourself with a heightened sense of detail. Sure, eventually they, like the details of your past explorations, will fade as you switch from large scale to small scale in your mental maps, but at the outset, all newly discovered or re-discovered details will elicit in you a revitalized sense of wonder that you experienced when you first left a crib to explore a world.

*Ever play a sport? A third basemen is aware of divots in the grass infield that might deflect a ground ball. An outfielder might be aware of mushy spots where drainage problems prevent sure footing. Both map those details for the duration of a game. The fan in the stands is usually unaware of those details unless a player gets a bad bounce or slips on a muddy surface. 

I’ll admit it—and you don’t have to. I have spent a little more time in front of my computer during the Great Isolation. And having done so, I’ve read what I ordinarily wouldn’t bother to read, the comment sections of a few reports. Usually, they are replete with bickering political opponents’ bantering, some malicious as you know. But this morning I saw a comment that called to mind an old problem. The comment centered on education, and the writer said that the education system teaches students what to think rather than how to think (for themselves).
 
Now, the commenter blames the Left for such a policy, but I believe one could make an argument that Left, Right, and even Center all adopt it at least in part. The problem isn’t new. Heraclitus has a similar thought in one of his Fragments: One can’t have knowledge without understanding, and one can’t have understanding without knowledge. Dilemma: Teach facts and ideas, or teach experimenting and thinking. You’ve heard it at least once in school, in either that algebra class or geometry class, when the teacher said the key reason to learn the subject is that it teaches how think. Of course, you couldn’t really learn how to think unless you memorized those axioms that high school texts accept as facts.
 
Knowing what to think is a part of human culture. If you want to live in a particular culture or subculture, you have to know the components, the “axioms” underlying the group’s thinking. That entails learning the what, and then all “how” stems from the “what.” And with so many subcultures on the planet’s surface, you can guess that most, if not all, of us are somehow involved in promulgating the “what” we learned to accept as truths. All of us can be blissfully happy in our subculture because everyone accepts the what. It’s only when we run up against another subculture that we might find our axioms wanting and our postulates erroneous.
 
The commenter whose comment caught my attention was responding to another’s question about people jumping on board cruise ships and traveling from sundry places to visit China at a time when at least some stories had leaked about the initial stages of the pandemic. One person, after saying people shouldn’t be boarding a cruise ship “right now” asked, “Why are people so stupid?” The comment about learning what to think vs. how to think followed.
 
Thinking for oneself isn’t easy. I suppose we could all cite models like the Buddha, Jesus, da Vinci, Newton, and Einstein and a host of others whose thinking subsequently became the axiomatic thinking of subcultures. On a scale less than earthshaking lie simple examples of people who really don’t think for themselves, like people who would gather in crowds in a time when a virus is killing thousands or those who in their youth-is-bliss ignorance would go to party on spring break.
 
But a pandemic, however instructive it is about the weaknesses in our ability to think, isn’t a forever kind of thing. Eventually, survivors will resume life as usual, including education as usual. And that raises the larger question: Is it really possible to teach people “how” to think? Won’t we resume teaching what? And once educated in this or that subculture, won’t we continue to think within a framework of axioms. They are “real” truths we think. They are for those in any subculture “self-evident.” Once adopted as the basis for thinking, axioms inevitably lead to postulates and conclusions. This is not just a matter of politics; it’s a way of life issue.
 
I’ll go back to Einstein as an example. After Newton, the subculture of physicists could think of gravity in only one way, the Newtonian way. But Einstein challenged the Newtonian axiom. Is there anything comparable in your personal history? Have you looked at the “what” of your thinking and overlooked the “how” of your thinking? These are two questions each of us should ask. And we shouldn’t just ask them in the context of whether or not we might board a ship or plane or chance a Covid-19 party. These questions should persist beyond the pandemic. If we don’t ask ourselves about the what and the how of thinking, we can only be practitioners of the former.
 
Learning “how” to think is a lifetime challenge, and as an example I’ll also use Einstein. Having shaped modern physics and introduced a key concept of quantum mechanics, Einstein remained largely in the “what” of his own devising. He could not, for example, accept the weirdness of the quantum world and kept trying to find a way to defend his position on the deterministic nature of the world. Quanta didn’t fall under his primary axiom. That even novel minds get trapped into the “whats” of their own making demonstrates to me that all of us have a potential intellectual struggle between justifying on the basis of a subculture of thought or learning about the world from a unique perspective.
 
Yes, some people boarded cruise ships and planes to sail off or fly off to exotic destinations even after the first ship was denied a port of call because of the coronavirus. Yes, days after the turmoil on 9-11, people boarded airplanes and resumed their travel plans as though nothing potentially threatened their own safety. But this isn’t a practice life. Risks are real. If people can’t think enough to at least temporarily alter their plans under a potential or largely unknown threat, then chances are they will continue to think as they have thought in the manner they have been taught when no ostensible threat manifests itself.   

“I don’t know whether or not you are aware, but there are people who study why we make decisions.”
 
“Didn’t know, but how earth-shaking is that? Really, don’t we just make decisions on either the basis of necessity or the basis of desire?”
 
“Well, that’s not a bad summary. I really hadn’t reduced it to something that simple, but I guess you nailed it, except for what some guys recently discovered about the Pavlovian side of the process, hinting at both the why of decision-making and also the how.”
 
“You mean the guy with the dog?”
 
“Yeah. But first let me get past the word guys. ‘Gals,’ too. Okay, interesting distraction here. If I say either, do I offend any? Offend all? End of distraction; I really don’t care because I don’t mean anything other than a colloquial expression, like the musical Guys and Dolls. Another distraction here. Do you see what supersensitivity does to the flow of language? Why did I have to stop to explain before I got to my main points? In the olden days… Oh! well, these days aren’t those days, so now that I distracted you from what I was going to say, I have to repeat the topic.”
 
“Go on.”
 
“So, Ashleigh K. Morse, Beatrice K. Leung, Emily Heath, Jesus Bertran-Gonzalez, Elise Papin, Billy C. Cheng, Bernard W. Balleine, and Vincent Laurent, writing in Neuron ran some experiments to discover pathways in the brain that lead to our making decisions. Now, they begin by acknowledging something you already know, that memory plays a role in decision-making.
 
“Real fast; here’s an example. Some long-lasting companies have advertised enough that you have grown accustomed to their commercials and have become a customer. That instills a favorable attitude because you saw the stimulus and got the reward, both of which are now part of your memory system. That memory system will probably shape similar decisions. For example, I remember my dad saying that he was a “Ford man,” and recently I heard a former Congressman-turned-commentator say the same thing on TV. And, of course, there are people who are similarly attached to other car makes, “a Chevy man” also being common. And you keep going back to the same products when you walk down the aisles of grocery stores perusing the multicolored packages and cans. Seems that Morse et al. have discovered the pathway between memory and decision begins in the basolateral amygdala. Right? That’s the well-known center of the flight-freeze-flight reaction, the deep emotional brain.
 
“Ashleigh (I don’t know her personally, and she might be offended by my presumptive use of her first name—another distraction) and colleagues say from the basolateral amygdala, the pathway leads through the nucleus accumbens, kind of a transition zone in the brain or maybe a train station where the process connects to the motor action section. Now, from there, the pathway gets a bit too much for any discussion, so I’ll reduce it, and if you want, you can read a summary of their work at medicalxpress.com.* Anyway, as I was saying, they discovered the pathway to run from delta opioid receptors in the nucleus accumbens through cholinergic interneurons. Those delta opioid receptors activate cellular responses, one of which is the infamous one that gets people addicted and the other of which is the prediction of a reward, kind of like getting that new Ford or Chevy. Those delta opioid receptors are part of a system or family called the G protein-coupled receptors that activate cellular responses. The authors shorten that to the ‘GPCR-based memory process.’
 
“Where are we goin’ with this? My flight response is kicking in.”
 
“The group explored how GPCR receptors encode psychological processes. So, we make decisions through specific pathways in the brain that are fundamentally Pavlovian, you know, the old stimulus-and-response stuff you read about in Psych 101. These “guys” tie that process to memory, what I call the “I’m a Ford/Chevy man” process that controls the decision-making on the new car lot. Been rewarded? Continue to seek the same reward through the next decision. I suppose the practical side of that is known by most of us and especially by people who want to build brand loyalty.
 
“But now, and this is the BIG NOW, all of us, and that’s the BIG ALL because it involves the WHOLE WORLD, are making memories through the GPCR receptors that will help to fashion our future decisions. Yeah! You are currently making memories as your brain deals with the Covid-19 pandemic. You can’t deny that you are responding in part from your amygdalae, can you?
And you are having to make decisions that aren’t just based on past stimuli and rewards. You are building that new pathway.
 
“I see.”
 
“Yes, so knowing there’s a process going on that involves your future in a very personal way, how are you going to handle the stimuli you are now receiving? There’s a very narrow path on which you are walking toward your future. Under intense stimuli that involve repeated rewards of one kind or another, you are establishing memories that will control or influence your decisions a year from now, ten years from now, or maybe throughout your life. All of us are now part of a big experiment on how the present shapes our personal futures.”
 
* https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-newly-memory-decision-making.html

Sitting in the line of cars at the bank drive-thru is now a “normal,” a “new normal,” to use the current expression. Gone for probably a year or so, or until a vaccine protects us from Covid-19, is that cherished personal contact humans have long considered “normal.”  Not that I have any more personal contact with Judy Bank-Teller other than her dropping change into my hand and then counting out some cash as fast as a party magician and exchanging a perfunctory, “Have a nice day,” and “Thank you,” but, sans physical touch, not too long ago I was able to get to within a teller’s counter width of another person who was neither friend nor relative. Now, my only exchange with a stranger is through a pneumatic tube and a squawk box speaker at the drive-thru, where a be-gloved teller sits behind a wall of glass.
 
Forty-five minutes. That’s how long the wait was as I inched my Ram toward the carport-like structure of the drive-thru, and that was in a small town and during a time when people have very few places to spend any money. But, then, there were the advantages of sitting in a slowly moving line of vehicles instead of standing in a line standing, of not having to make the person in front of you think you are trying to see the nature of her bank transaction, and, of course, of listening to satellite radio stations or a burgeoning library of downloaded songs on my iPhone. I could even make phone calls. Hey, I guess the trip to the bank wasn’t so bad an experience. Time in my man-room-truck, all the comforts of a Barca Lounger, and a cup of coffee cooling just as the Second Law of Thermodynamics says it should cool! Wait! This is getting even better. Did I just get an idea for this blog? Is my muse sitting in the truck with me? Are the people in front and behind me feverishly jotting down on old Starbucks receipts some notes for their next novels as they also wait? Is the linear world of vehicles filled not with mere drivers but rather with drivers of society and culture? Is there a physicist behind me who finally understands while sitting in a string of cars that string theory has been a waste of time because there will never be a way in her time, however beautiful the math, to demonstrate it through clever experimentation?
 
You know, this sitting in the drive-thru experience isn’t so bad. Unfortunately, since there’s nowhere to spend the money I withdrew, I really don’t have to make another trip to the bank until the quarantine ends. I could, of course, sit in my truck in the driveway and pretend, could even run the engine, though that would eventually mean a trip to the gas station, where I would have to use disinfectant wipes on the nozzle handle and the key pad while wearing the closest thing I have to latex gloves, the rubber-coated garden gloves from the garage that then I have to clean with alcohol.
 
And maybe there’s a lesson in having to use the drive-thru, the lesson that life itself is a drive-thru. And yes, sometimes it means inching forward and having to endure the feeling that life itself sometimes seems to be at a standstill. But the feeling is just imposed by impatient minds. The line does move even though intermittently. Then, upon reaching the teller and finishing a transaction, each driver emerges from the carport and accelerates briefly until…
 
Until one enters the next line and intermittent movement toward reaching the next goal. But isn’t that why life is like baseball and war: Nothing really happens until everything happens at once. You inch toward the teller, and then you frantically reach for the pneumatic tube’s cylinder, fumble to put the money in or take it out, know that there’s someone immediately behind you wanting to take your place and knowing, also, that you have to get to the next phase of your life toward which you briefly accelerate before, once again, slowing down to an ostensible stop. Speed up; slow down; speed up again, like ellipsis marks separated by a string of commas…,…,…,…,…,…,…,…. But think of the alternative. You don’t want to arrive at that final punctuation mark, do you? Enjoy the stop-start-stop-start life you have in life’s drive-thru.

“You know that expression, ‘I recognize your face, but the name escapes me’ we use when we meet someone from our deep past? Well, now we have a new problem. With everyone walking around wearing surgical masks, we might not even have a face to name. What’s a brain with a fading memory to do? What’s going to come out of the mouth? ‘I’m sorry, I recognize your body, but I can’t recall either your name or your face.’”
 
“Oh! Things aren’t that bad.”
 
“No, they are. And the only way we’ll see faces is on some electronic device. We’ll continue to see people on venues like FaceTime and SnapChat, but we’ll lack that three-dimensionality we were so used to. Holy cow! I just realized it. We’ve all become Flatlanders, as in Edwin A. Abbott’s nineteenth-century novel Flatland. All the people we know are going to be two-dimensional images on our smart phones, tablets, and computer screens.”
 
“I see what you mean. Hadn’t thought of that. Guess we are becoming somewhat two-dimensional nowadays. But it isn’t as though we hadn’t been preparing for this day. For years we’ve been walking around next to three-dimensional beings while we paid increasing attention to our two-dimensional world of images and texts on smart devices. I think this is the culmination, the way we finally become one with the screen. It’s Zen. From the time of Homo erectus, now known to be two million years ago, through all those other hominins, this, apparently, is what we’ve been evolving toward. We’ve been extricating ourselves from that third dimension, that one we call depth. Talk about ‘shallow people’; that’s what we’ve become, and we started the process even before a pandemic forced us into screen relationships. Somebody’s got to do something like invent an affordable three-dimensional iPad so that we can reclaim what we once were—less the actual touching, of course. Otherwise, we’re headed into Flatland.”  
 
“And that can’t be good news.”

Have you ever watched one of those UFO shows on TV, the ones supposedly giving historical reports? Well, I did while I was on the treadmill today. Those reports make nice stories, but I am unconvinced, especially when the UFOs reveal themselves with lights on their underside. I’m guessing that since UFOs don’t appear to land after flying over Phoenix, for example, then there’s no reason for lights other than taunting: “Hey, we’re up here; you don’t know who or what we are; and there isn’t anything you can do about us.” Come on! Lights on the spacecraft? We didn’t even have such bright lights on the Space Shuttle or any of the capsules we’ve sent into space and back.
 
But it makes an interesting story. Surely, we have enough mysteries to solve, what with Big Foot running around appearing only as a blurry object partially off camera on videos taken at twilight. Hey, how many pixels did that camera have? I think I’ve captured a baseball coming off the bat of hitters more clearly with my cell phone than Big Foot hunters capture with theirs a lumbering hairy giant. And then there’s always the ancient monument. How did those Egyptians get those pyramids to square with an error of only an inch or so long before Euclid gave us geometry? And we’re still looking for the Grail, even if Dan Brown fans say it’s not a cup, but rather a bloodline. Yes, we are steeped in mysteries, all giving us a hint at solution, but no hint as brilliant as lights hovering in the night sky above Phoenix.
 
And that makes me wonder why, when the SARS Covid-19 virus came out of Wuhan, China, so many want to make its origin a mystery, why so many want to pursue conspiracy theories. Is it because they weren’t there to see a virus naturally mutate? Were government biologists involved? Did aliens drop the virus from their well-lighted ships?
 
Is it natural for people to seek the unnatural for explanations? To seek the exotic?
 
Nanometer-size viruses don’t take selfies and don’t make films of their transitions from animal to human infectious agents. They just change as opportunity affords, and their change is as good an argument for the effects of favorable (for the organism itself) mutations as any. This pandemic isn’t the first, and it won’t be the last. Each will occur unexpectedly like hovering lights over Phoenix, but unlike those lights that have never made an irrefutably documented human contact, each will, instead, invade as some agent alien to the human body.
 
Two kinds of humans seem to push conspiracies with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, those who have a political agenda and those who refuse to accept evolutionary changes as natural processes. In the course of human events, there’s nothing new in this. Some people want to scapegoat; others want to deny certain realities because accepting a current reality can be difficult in the context of preconceived notions and expectations.
 
Fortunately, you don’t fall into either category. Right?  

Much of history is approximately dated; the farther back in time one goes, the less certain the date. When there are no written records, we have information through proxies like archaeological studies or radiocarbon, potassium-argon, or uranium-lead dating, these last being methods that scientists constantly refine. Those who do the refining are at it again, recalibrating the radiocarbon dates for some Mediterranean events like the eruption of Santorini.* Ah! Santorini. White buildings with blue roofs perched on the cliffs of a caldera immersed in beautiful blue water. Vacation destination. Does it matter when that setting took shape in a massive eruption? Sitting at a seaside café or by the pool of your hotel, do you have any feeling for those who tended sheep on the sides of the volcano or on the nearby islands? Any feeling for the people called the Minoans?
 
You might consider the accuracy of your own age-dating: It’s down to the minute for most of us who were born in hospitals. I know, for example, that I’m three hours older than one of my cousins. If I wanted to do the research, I could probably pin that difference down to minutes. That difference in time is an insignificant fact that is at best interesting to my cousin and me and maybe to some relatives. But what about that eruption of Santorini? One would be hard pressed to proclaim the event “insignificant.” When Thera erupted, it appears to have literally wiped out a vibrant civilization and set the stage for the rise of the ancient Greeks who gave us geometry, philosophy, and the rudiments of science.
 
Does it matter that the volcano might have erupted in the 16th rather than in the 17th century BC? Possibly. Remember that after that eruption pre-Greek culture arose. Who exactly had the most influence on ancient Greece? Was it the Minoans? The Mycenaeans? Who cares?
 
So, imagine now that you are an archaeologist or a radiocarbon scientist living 3,000 years from now trying to figure out when a pandemic affected the path of human civilization. Does it matter if it occurred in 2019, 2020, or even 2050? How refined do you want your age-dating? Of course, just as the powerful, civilization-destroying eruption of Thera was a significant event for those of the time, the pandemic of 2020 is a potentially significant civilization-altering event of this time. But the farther in time we are from this or any other event, the less we personally concern ourselves with the timing of its exact happening. How related do you feel to the people of 3,500 years ago? Not, obviously, as much as you feel related to your contemporaries.
 
Yet, that event shaped in many ways who and your contemporaries are. The rise of the ancient Greeks changed how people saw the world, and their culture has influenced even the peoples of the Far East as globalization proliferated through tentacles of trade and conquest around the world. And this pandemic event, not so localized as the eruption of Thera, is bound to have a lasting influence.
 
We could argue that in every age, we can see the rudiments of the future. Having the perspective of written history and archaeological discovery aided by radiocarbon dating, we are probably more aware of changes that big events engender than the peoples of ancient cultures could foresee. Note the numbers of TV commentators and newspaper editorialists in the midst of the SARS Covid-19 pandemic predicting the changes to come. They don’t really know the details because no one can precisely say how events will unfold beyond the obvious changes most can perceive. Cataclysms have come and gone and will continue to come and go, and their effects have dendritic patterns. Some branches of change will be temporary setbacks to the march of local civilization; others will be growths of new trends.
 
From the perspective of today’s global view of things, that eruption of Thera was rather local, though as we know, large eruptions can alter the amount of incoming sunlight and, as a consequence, lower worldwide temperatures. We saw that recently when Pinatubo erupted. No doubt some far distant groups were affected 3,500 years ago without knowing what caused their change in weather. Those who lived throughout the Northern Hemisphere millennia ago couldn’t see the spread of volcanic ejecta through the stratosphere, ringing Earth with dust and sulfur dioxide. You, by comparison, are well aware of the nature of the current world-altering event; you have watched the virus spread. And for you dating this event is not an approximation, not a range of years spanning half to whole century, not something that you note as “c. 2020” or “cir. 2020.” You mark it as January, February, March, or some other month in 2020 when you feel its direct effect.
 
For you, regardless of your acceptance of “circa” for events long past, there’s nothing approximate about the events of the present.  
*https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200319141036.htm  Accessed April 1, 2020.

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