I was thinking about the delay of the onset of symptoms for Covid-19, how it can take 5 days or more to show symptoms of the virus and how it complicates our response to it. Our current understanding is it takes a certain viral load to become infected, to become contagious to others, and to develop symptoms—we’re still learning the exact timelines for each phenomenon and there is variance among different people as well as potential overlap between the different events. That’s what makes this virus so hard: there’s periods of time where everything seems fine, in which you don’t know you are sick and can spread the pathogen to others. But then I realized how everything takes time. We’ve grown soft in this luxurious technological world, where pages load incredibly fast on the internet and communication occurs instantly across great distances. In the real world, we have to wait. Things take time. If you want to lose weight, you don’t drop it after eating less for just one day. You don’t get in shape after one workout. Starting a company takes time. Learning a new skill takes innumerable repetition. We don’t really live in an instantaneous world. Perhaps if we taper our expectations, we won’t only deal with the coronavirus better; maybe we’ll come back to the present, maintain awareness, and live better lives.