Seasons are the ultimate fractal that governs our lives, and understanding the nature of the seasons is how we can understand different events that happen in our world.

Each season contains the others within it. For example, winter has a spring of winter, a summer of winter, an autumn of winter, and a winter of winter.

Different events or phenomena also have seasons to them. Financial markets and real estate markets have seasons. Sports “seasons” have seasons: training camp, the main season, the playoffs, the championship. And diseases also are seasons and have seasons within them.

The Coronavirus Winter

Michael Osterholm is an infectious disease expert who has been warning for 15 years that the United States is ill prepared for a pandemic. He has called the current pandemic the “coronavirus winter.”

We can see how the coronavirus in the macro sense is a winter:

In the United States, our way of life as we know it is shutting down for the foreseeable future. Schools. Offices. Restaurants. Retail stores. Sports events. Movie theaters. Broadway. Gyms. Yoga and fitness studios. Airlines.

We are being forced to retreat within, to hibernate and isolate. This is winter.

Although we don’t know exactly how long this winter will last, we can apply our understanding of the seasons to help us navigate where we are. Like a natural winter, the coronavirus winter contains all the seasons within it.

We are in the spring of the coronavirus winter, heading into the summer. The virus has emerged, and begun to spread. It will get more intense as we head into the “summer” of the coronavirus winter — just like the summer of a seasonal winter is when we experience the most extreme temperatures and harshest storms.

Eventually, we will reach the autumn, as it begins to recede, and finally the winter of winter, as it trails off and we can emerge from our isolation.