The way I keep my sanity during this pandemic lock-down is STRUCTURE, by which I mean doing the same things every day that I did before we got all closed in on ourselves. In my case this means writing for several hours two mornings a week (the other days include two for environmental activism and one for finances, with the weekends off.)  As you may have noticed, the resulting blogs, posts, and tweets have  been on the cheerful side – light-hearted, or even (I hope) humorous.

The whole time, however, I was working on this piece for Impakter,  a European online magazine where I am a columnist. And in the middle of writing it, my older daughter, whose visionary ideas about the use of artificial intelligence to improve society are key to the article, came down with the coronavirus.  Mercifully, she recovered.  

Whereas Lorien envisions human beings fully capable of melding head and heart to build a better  world, I am more skeptical about whether we have the moral will to achieve the world we long for once (if) we get through to the other side of the Pandemic Gateway.