People who have had to put funerals and graduations and weddings off to try to keep Covid-19 infections down are not beholden to the dumb bug for the trouble and disappointment it is causing. They may be in no mood to count their blessings or consider anything positive about the bug or the effect of it spreading around the country and the world. I imagine good writers and alert researchers are assembling anecdotes and statistics that do show some fortuitous effects of it and of our attempts to contain it.
Of course, we all know about working from home and using Zoom to see each other. There are benefits of both and of not having to stand out in the winter cold, waiting for the school bus. It is quite clear that being online and visible to others is not the same as being in a group at a good table in a nice place. Several cartoons have depicted the online participant wearing a nice top in front of a webcam carefully aimed at parts of the house that don't look too bad with the dog playing beneath slippered feet.
Many writers and thinkers through the ages have focused on the parts of us that are passions and compared them to parts of us that seem more purely brain power like imagination and analysis. The excellent series Hacking Your Mind on PBS and on Amazon TV reminds us in four episodes that our long-time biological impulses affect our thinking rapidly and deeply. That same series mentions the work by the team of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in showing built-in tendencies we have that can direct us toward sugar, fat, salt, fights, dangerous driving and jealousies quickly and subtly. Several authorities give the advice "Slow down" to try to see if an impulse should be followed or fought. Coronavirus, in some ways, has enabled us to do some of that.
Lisa Feldman Barrett has a nice little book called "7 ½ Lessons about the Brain" and they are good ones. The first lesson is that our brains are not for thinking. Oh, yeah? Well, what are they for, then? They are for running the body and all its systems, like breathing (keep it going!), digesting, seeing, not falling over or out of your chair, etc., etc. When the virus shuts down a favorite store, we get a chance to consider what is happening and how we can work around the loss of a possibility. We get the gift of looking at alternatives.
