Hannah and I escaped from prison long enough to walk the hounds around the block this morning. We have to go in opposite directions, because when we try to walk Annie and Jasper together they spend the whole time fighting for the alpha position and it’s more of a stressful stroll than a relaxing one.

The battle between stress and relaxation is dominating these days. Relaxation, because we’re basically ordered to lay around the house for the foreseeable future, and stress because no one knows what the foreseeable future holds. In other words, no one can see very far into the future.

Now, the COVID age is slowly transitioning from the initial panic and hysteria of February and March into just a steady thrum of fretting and worrying about what next week will bring, and what June will bring, and what 2021 will bring. It reminds me a lot of a two-panel cartoon by Joe Martin with the first panel captioned “three men falling into a bottomless pit” showing the three men screaming and kicking and bug-eyed with fear, and the second panel showing the same men three months later, all bored out of their minds during just another day in the course of their endless fall.

Not that this is a bottomless pit. It’ll have a bottom, though literally no one knows when we’ll hit it or what the landing will be like. I’ve asked leaders and experts to make predictions about both questions, and there’s just not enough science or knowledge to even create a scenario around.

There are a few things we know, though. The old normal is gone for a long time. When we at last venture out of lockdown, it’s not going to be like George Clooney walking out of prison and into the backseat with Julia Roberts and trading barbs with driver Brad Pitt.

If there’s a consensus about the future, it’s this: Things will be different.

The 6-foot rule is going to be law for a while. We’re not going to a packed Dodger Stadium or Staples Center. We’ll be lucky to catch a weeknight Dirtbags game.

Date night at the movies will be you, then empty seat, empty seat, empty seat and your date. You say “pass me the popcorn,” your date better have a throwing arm like a young Bo Jackson.

Restaurants? They’re going to need a lot more room. A table for two is going to look like something out of “Downton Abbey” with the patriarch and matriarch sitting at either end of a quarter-mile-long table, muttering, or, rather, shouting niceties to one another.

And school will never be the same. It’s almost a good thing that enrollment in the school district is dwindling year by year, because the days of cramming 35 students in a classroom the size of a storage bin will no longer be tenable. Either tele-teaching is going to have to work, or a class of 30 or more kids will have to meet in the auditorium or gymnasium, or out in an open field, as they did following the 1933 earthquake.

On our walk we saw a lot of what life is like now. Stay-at-home moms, either by choice or by mandate, stood in their own yards, chatting across driveways at other moms. Their kids, too, stayed on their parents’ property, drawing on the sidewalk with chalk or tossing a ball to one another. Everyone appeared to be friendly, and maybe that’s something beneficial to come out of this “we’re all in this together” age. A bit more helpfulness, a bit more empathy and compassion.

Another benefit: The spring days are beautiful and, while we’re all hyper aware that the virus is floating along with, it nevertheless is sometimes hard to believe, because the air seems so clear, as us as my daughter and I stroll clockwise and counterclockwise around the block with our power-hungry dogs.

More than a few times during the last week or so, it’s occurred to me that this is what we should have been doing to protect ourselves from the less immediate, in-your-face crisis of climate change, and that COVID-19 could be a virus the planet has released as a last-ditch effort to save itself and to force humankind to at least slow down, take a breath, and quit rushing headlong to the end of things.