Everyone is safely in bed, and I find myself thinking that this is the sweetest moment of the day because I can reassure myself with the knowledge that everyone is in the safest place imaginable — their own bed. “We made it through another day,” I can think.

In the past, this thought rarely popped up. These days, it’s a daily realization.

In the past, this thought reassured a fear (that something could go dreadfully, nearly-fatally wrong) that I rarely experienced. These days, that anxiety is a daily shadow, adding a touch of gray to most everything if I let it. And when I think of it after not having thought about it consciously for some time, I’m grateful for the respite.

This is not to say I go around in near-paranoia about COVID-19. But I realized today that we go through this crisis with the assumption that nothing is going to happen to us — all those who are sick, all those who die, they are not us and will not be — just like we do with everything else. Smokers know that inhaling smoke into the lungs can ultimately result in cancer, but because it doesn’t happen 100% of the time, everyone has that wiggle room: “Yes, it happens a lot, but it won’t happen to me.”

With a pandemic, though, I don’t know that we could really function any other way. We go through all the precautions yet still have to take chances, going out shopping with the realization that asymptomatic people could be anywhere but with the hope that social distancing and proper hygiene will ultimately keep us safe. I don’t know that we could function any other way and not fall into a depressed fatalism that paralyzes.

So when everyone is in bed, I can say to myself, “They’re safe once again.”

Yet how many dangers lurk around us that, were we cognizant of them, would paralyze many of us with terror? Maybe none; maybe countless. Just look at the run on supermarkets that just occurred. When people are scared, they panic. Panic leads to pandemonium. Just how close to societal collapse are we at any given moment? Probably much closer than we like to think, so we don’t think about it. We all do our part and rely on everyone else following suit.

If there’s any blessing that comes from this whole thing, it should be the realization — a collective epiphany — that we are much more fragile than we would ever like to think, both as biological and societal organisms. The technology of modernity has led us to believe that we’re invincible, but, of course, we aren’t. I wonder if a loss of that sense of invincibility is the terror that would paralyze some. In other words, a willful obliviousness to our own fragility.