Read some stuff.  These are all pandemic related.  Maybe they'll provoke some thoughts.  Then, if you can, go on a walk.  A long quiet walk.  Be alone with your thoughts.  Again--if you can.  

Agnes Callard is one of the more thoughtful philosophers in American philosophy these days, and also one of those willing to write to a non-professional audience in an interesting and provocative way.  In this piece she provocatively asks if the humanities, or perhaps "humanists," are failing in the Coronavirus:

Some of the best things are delicate. The fact that they can be crushed is not an argument against their value but one in favor of providing them with protective enclosures. Yes, it is possible to spin the straw of empty time into gold, but such a pursuit requires many supports. I can teach you to see something in the abstruse arguments against atomism in Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption—to become excited by them, engaged by ancient physics—but things need to be just right. I need a physical classroom, a blackboard, a set of students I have spent a quarter getting to know. I need the world outside to stay quiet. The fact that current circumstances impair that setting is not a refutation of philosophy. It is a proof of how much effort we should put into getting things back to normal, so that we can once again help each other see the world of the mind for the beautiful, wondrous place it is.

I confess my experience is not entirely like hers, but I find her thought-provoking.  

For me, the new experience of pandemic has put me more deeply in touch with the history of human thinking, and humanist thinking, precisely because it has revealed to me a kind of vulnerability, and an awareness of mortality, that I had otherwise ignored--or, perhaps better, of which I was previously ignorant.  It's also rendered me, I think, a fair amount more deeply anxious about vulnerability, my own and my families', because of our accidental dislocation from home.  (We're away from Cville on sabbatical.)  This is currently coursing through my mind, and also I think likely to affect how I read and write and talk from here on out.  

How much of this is different modes of coping, dependant upon personality?  How much is different ages and stages of life?  How much is different religious and metaphysical orientations?  I don't know.  But I do know I found Callard's piece usefully provocative.

Interesting piece.  “It is harder to achieve the via contemplativa in the age of rolling news. That’s one virtue of the desert: no wifi.”  Or as Romuald of Camaldoli put it: side in cella quasi in paradiso. 

This is an interesting collection (maybe behind a paywall) of pieces that are framed as being "prompted" by the pandemic, but in fact everyone who writes here seems to be writing stuff they would have written a few months ago, before the pandemic.  It's not just continuous with that older stuff; it's pretty much the same stuff, re-frosted.  This makes me think that we don't yet know what the Coronavirus will do to our world and it's one reason why I've resisted the one or two requests I've had to opine on it yet.  I simply don't have anything especially interesting, so far, to say. From the looks of these pieces, nobody else does, either.   

And if you don’t like Saint Jerome as a model for social distancing, try Henry David Thoreau.  (And for an alternate reading of the lesson Thoreau teaches us, check out this.)

A different metric to understand the pandemic: how it is affecting societies’ civic health.  

The image in this article of where mobile devices travelled after being at one Fort Lauderdale beach in March—I’ll just say it’s a striking visual.  

Be well, be grateful you weren't in Lauderdale for Spring Break, and wash those hands.