I’m sick of looking at logarithmic scales and comparing infection rates among different nations. I can’t peel myself away from the data, though, looking at site after site after site.

I text with friends and family around the world, comparing the news media to lived experience.

I feel lucky. I feel guilty. I feel scared.

I’m continuing my work as best I can. My university suspended activities. My kids are home from school too and everything would be fine except that we all need to keep working, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. They have six or so hours of school a day, and so the general idea is that there should be six hours of replacement work at home. Plus homework. It’s completely absurd of course, but no one knows anything anymore.

My field research to Paris has been cancelled. My field research to Los Angeles has been cancelled. I’ve got no idea how I’m supposed to do the work I’ve been hired to do. This is a research project centered on teasing out mega-event-driven urban development schemes in two cities where I don’t live, after all. But there are other things to concern us now, like how to get groceries without dying, or killing anyone else.

I do enjoy these rupture moments, though, in a strange and possibly sick way. It’s not that I take any pleasure in the suffering or discomforts, of course. No – it’s more that there’s a suspension of ordinary routine that allows you to take stock of the moment.

A pause.

Do you like how your life is configured? Do you like how the social order is structured? Is the political economy that governs our behavior decent, or fair, or fun? Is the destruction of the biosphere due to our addiction to economic growth really necessary? Are my “normal days” really the way I want to spend my days?

I’m under no illusions that The Great Pause will most likely result in things getting worse. The rich will get richer, somehow. The fascists will entrench themselves further in the halls of power. And somehow their popular support will continue to grow. I don’t get it either.

But there’s still a sliver of hope – a tiny one, sure, but it’s there. That in much the same way as the Great Depression lead to the New Deal, that this Great Pause will lead to a better chapter for us all too.