(In an earlier version, I had a picture of Antje Duvekot's album cover, "The Near Demise of the High Wire Dancer."  https://www.antjeduvekot.com/index.php?page=cds&display=1007  Please visit Antje at https://www.youtube.com/user/AntjeDuvekotChannel)

Keep your balance

It's all about making your way through ordinary life and the trials thereof.  And not getting too caught up in the winds that blow and the momentary light afflictions.  Stay the course.

These are a few helpful areas to emphasize, so we can keep together in troubled times.

Human touch.  Make peace with those in your house.  Family and loved ones.  

The music is good.  Music to listen to, and music as music practice and lessons and preparing for performing and then performing.  Even for people in your house and on the street where you live.  Some people make online concerts, which can be as low key as you like.

Exercise.  My grandkids are into weightlifting and the like, but when the gyms closed, they stopped.  But that's just a hindrance, not a closed door.  I'm as low-key a fellow as you're likely to find, but even I have a treadmill that will work when I turn it on.  

Is this all?  Nope, not by a long shot.  Is it complete advice? Nah.  Is it something?  Well, yeah.  And, gotta say, it's what I've been landing on, to emphasize, to keep my own balance.  I didn't even mention the regular strategies.

A problem with giving and taking advice about how to get through life is that people have their own issues, circumstances, and so forth.  For instance, someone has trouble seeing.  So you say, my glasses helped me, here try them on.  What? They didn't help? 

THE USA is holding to a higher standard of social distancing than the world at large. Why? PART ONE.

The USA is holding to a higher standard of social distancing than the world at large.  

Reflected in markers such as that we want to keep schools closed, while the rest of the world is not.

Why is this?

Two heuristics or guides to thought are to use personality traits (OCEAN/the Big Five) to predict what ought to happen if such and such were the case, and to view things through what ought to happen if a group assumes Christian metaphysics as the reality on which we base the rightness or wrongness of our prudent actions.

A problem with trying to ask and answer this title's question is that an ad hoc explanation could go either way and have no compelling force.  So to make the analysis a little better, we would have to spell out what the conditions were, and predict what the assumptions would lead to, singularly and in interaction.

Loving the Truth, Receiving the Truth, Defending the Truth.

One of my children, when he went to college, thought that the philosophy class would be a lot like dinnertime with Dad, where we would socratically talk about ideas, to get to the truth.  But, alas, he was being asked to remember dates and pivotal figures and power struggles.  It would be fair to say that this child of mine did not enjoy the course, any more than I would have.

Over adult years, this child of mine, now fully grown with serious responsibilities, and whom I respect greatly, has stopped having discussions like these with me.  He thought that I was sparring, or playing, with no serious point to it.  As if our adult conversations were to the truth as high school wrestling is to hand to hand warfare with bayonets.  I was seeing our adult conversations as more analogous to Fort Benning or Parris Island, with the truth as being the next hill to take, at possible cost to our lives.

And as anyone who has trained and fought in the military or as a first responder, there is a joy to being part of a Band of Brothers (or the equivalent), and a joy in fighting a good fight, even where there is pain and suffering and the possible loss of all good things.  The stakes are high, in loving and receiving the truth, and in defending the weak and the oppressed and in defending freedom.

When Lewis uses the word 'art', we may fairly substitute 'philosophy' or 'ideas' or even the humble term, 'words'.

Lewis writes:

A work of (whatever) art can be either ‘received’ or ‘used.’  When we ‘receive’ it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist. When we ‘use’ it we treat it as assistance for our own activities. The one, to use an old-fashioned example, is like being taken for a bicycle ride by a man who may know roads we have never yet explored. The other is like adding one of those little motor attachments to our own bicycle and then going for one of our familiar rides. These rides in themselves may be good, bad, or indifferent. The ‘uses’ which the many make of the arts may or may not be intrinsically vulgar, depraved, or morbid. That’s as may be. ‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.

C.S. Lewis.  An Experiment in Criticism, p. 88.