The crisis we are facing is not the coming of the apocalypse.

I agree, COVID-19 ain’t chopped liver. We are reeling from the impact of the shelter-in-place directive, confined to our homes, compelled to obey restrictive rules from a catalog of authorities. We are victims of circumstances beyond our control. Those who live from paycheck to paycheck are living from day to day. Fear is the undercurrent of our every activity.

But the bodies are not piling up in Daley Plaza. An army of disenchanted veterans is not marching on Washington (at least not yet). The Olympics have been cancelled but the Nathan Hot Dog Eating Contest is still on as far as I know.

The big impact has been to our psyche.

Millennials have begun to realize there is no such thing as eternal youth. Us seniors have gone from facing mortality to embracing its imminence. Baby boomers have looked at the Dow Jones and realized at long last, the bloom is off the boom. It’s disheartening… but it is the opportunity for us to reconnoiter and reconsider, to ask ourselves, is this the world we want to live in… maybe this pause in the race to the cliff where the lemmings leap is the opportunity to create a better world.

I’m not talking about starting a Bitcoin-like app for virtual toilet paper. My wife, more connected to the universe than I, offers a guide to what is possible in an email to her considerable following.

The Coronavirus can be the wake-up call, the alarm reminding us that we are all connected; that the borders on a map do not separate us; fame and riches do not exempt us when the symptoms turn deadly; skin color and religion are incidental when a cough leaps from one to another; and that separation between our health and the health of our planet is a fiction.

Perhaps the virus, by forcing us to stay in our homes, will remind us of how important our family and home life are and how much we have neglected this fundamental part of our lives.

History can write about the Corona virus as the disaster that plunged the world into chaos… or the realization of a spiritual rebirth and revitalization of our commitment to our highest good.