Coronavirus is forcing social distancing, but we’ve already been doing that for years

Just the other day, I went out and observed people mingling en masse. I watched a crowd of tourists in the forecourt of what I still call Mann's Chinese place their hands, as they've always done, into the much-touched cement handprints of stars.

I watched shoppers crowd around tables and fondle the shiny iPhones and MacBooks on display at the Apple Store at The Grove. I watched families squeeze in next to other families to admire the outdoor mall's dancing fountain.

The mall wasn't exactly hopping, but I saw only the odd mask. I didn't notice anyone make an obvious effort to stand six feet away from anyone else. If social distancing was happening, it was too subtle for me.

The sun was out. Rain had yet to fall. Life in the time of coronavirus, I thought, didn't seem to have changed our habits so much.

Still, as I stood just off to the side taking these scenes in, I felt an intense wave of loss and nostalgia. It was only later when I was at home on my own that I fully began to understood why.

At first I thought I was mourning the enforced separation from each other that we were just about to start experiencing. Then I realized I was mourning a togetherness already on the way out — from a long ago age before Amazon, before Netflix, before Postmates. Before giant flat-screen home TVs with surround sound, before virtual reality.

We are in the midst of a pandemic. People suddenly are falling sick. They are dying. We must practice social distancing now — for our own health, to protect the health of others and to fight to keep this coronavirus in check.

But haven't we been distancing ourselves from each other more and more for years? Isn't being apart becoming more and more our norm?

I'd started out thinking about how, in California, we're used to crises making us come together, not come apart. In the rubble, in the ash, we're used to crossing our own property lines and comfort zones and reaching out to anyone at all who needs help.

But then I realized that part of what's striking in the modern era of our earthquakes and fires and mudslides is the many times when neighbors who were strangers meet each other in extremis, when in calamity communities suddenly spring to life and coalesce.

Because in the modern age, in ordinary circumstances, a lot of us increasingly keep to ourselves. After all, it's become so very easy and convenient.

Why go to a restaurant when you can have exactly what you would have ordered there delivered to you in the comfort of your home? Why go to a theater when you can watch a movie that's practically just come out on TV?

Why go see a friend when you can Facetime and text? Why go to the store and see people — except for pandemic panic shopping — when you have Amazon and Instacart? Why work in an office with others when you can do your job on your own in your pajamas?

The day after I went out in search of crowds, the rain arrived here in Los Angeles — literally and figuratively.

Southern California grew gray and damp. Coronavirus closed in.

Events that draw crowds started being canceled right and left. So did plenty of far cozier, more intimate gatherings. Concerts, conferences, festivals, tournaments, classes, church services, campaign rallies — all nixed, postponed or preparing to become online only.

Everything changed in a flash, dictated by necessity. Social distance was no longer theoretical, isolation no longer optional.

I've written before about my worries about a modern-day world in which more and more people are isolated and lonely, working at jobs without offices, going whole days without real human contact. Now we're all in that boat.

I'm hoping enforced separation will do the trick and slow down the community spread of coronavirus. I'm willing to do anything to help make that happen. I think we all have to be all in to do that.

Still, many things I often chose to do immediately felt different and constricting when they were no longer by choice.

All our modern conveniences — our screens and our apps, our online shopping, our delivery services — can provide us with so much coziness and ease when we're feeling overstimulated and worn out and need to retreat from the big world outside.

But it's one thing to work from home because you feel like it and you can. It's another to be told that you cannot go spend the day with your co-workers in the office. It's one thing to stream a movie by choice or to choose to watch a basketball game on TV. It's another to be told that you should not go to a movie theater, that you can't go to a basketball game, that concerts have been called off.

It's one thing to order in food because you want to put on your comfy clothes and curl up on the couch. It's another thing to get a note from one of the delivery apps saying you can now request not to even see your delivery person but to have your order left at the front door.

It's one thing to know you can choose the big world anytime, when you're tired of the couch and of texting.

Right now, of course, just a few days in, I want nothing more than to go out to eat with friends, to hug a neighbor, to hold a hand.

I'm hoping we get to the other side of this without large-scale tragedy. There's no way of knowing yet if we will.

But if we do, I'm hoping that the experience of social distancing gives us pause and makes us realize how much we have missed company, not just the company of those we know and love but of strangers.

We live in a world that can be scary, a world where people fire into crowds, where stock markets crash, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots keeps growing, along with the anger and division. But I'm hoping that if we get through this, we don't let fear take over, that we come together again in full appreciation of how good that can feel.

Just the other day, I watched people mingling en masse. I hope I'll get to do so again before long.