Covid shredded my conception of time. It’s getting a little better lately, and I’ll write about how that’s happened. But first, I’m thinking a lot about how this period has felt. As the last 2 1/2 years are coming into focus, and data and trends are more clear, I am finding that I can’t quite place myself or my own experiences along the timelines I know are true.
I often ‘tell past time’ in one of two ways -through what and when I write and through my relationships, that is, with whom and where I spent time. But I just experienced an entire year over which I wrote nothing, no prayers or blogs or even personal letters, and I can’t quite recall the lack. The only people I have seen in nearly 3 years are my church community (a very small group), my husband and my work partner, and a handful of friends. So my usual links to time haven’t been available to me.
All of this has me thinking about how I came to understand time as a child. One of my early Girl Scout leaders explained the idea to our Brownie troop that we could make our own relative sundials with our own bodies as the stationary center object. When the sun was directly over our heads, it was our own noon. Exactly 12:00 pm by a clock? No, never quite precisely. But that relative positioning with the understanding that space over which the sun moved represented set amounts of time meant I always knew about what time it was in the day to day, the hour to hour. Pretty much.
And this was important because I was also losing time. My lived experience of time was very different from this mechanical reading of it. I could spend hours getting lost in the patterns of mirror reflections, or arranging and implementing various tics. I could spend hours daydreaming and creating worlds. I could spend hours reading, and would get so immersed in books that I could not actually hear things happening around me. And at no point did I ever have a good answer when asked to account for that time.
Not for nothing, but I could also never account for the lost jackets and watches, hats and gloves. All of those questions fell into the same category for me: I have no idea.
At some level when you are a child in a secure home and a routine and regular school, much the issues of time are taken care of for you. I was sort of carried along by my schedule, and the schedule of my family, and although I could ‘tell’ time in actually a variety of ways, I found I had real trouble when as a teenager, I had to begin to manage my own time.
I was known in my group of friends as someone who kept her own time, and was always and without fail late to things. My arrival somewhere was never assured and at some point, I began to understand this as a burden on others. I forced myself to begin a discipline I have continued to this day -marking the blocks of time that something requires. I began thinking of time like legos, and then eventually more interactive like Tetris, but Tetris had to be invented before that thought occurred to me.
This was also around the time that I started reading the popular presentations of physics and quantum mechanics, and began to wrap my mind around those understandings of time. My father and I read The Dancing Wu Li masters and The Tao of Physics together in the late-80s, and my universe exploded.
I’d spent all this energy ordering my life to conform to a linear time model only to now learn that this was indeed, as I’d always suspected, a construct itself. Time was fluid. Time was flexible. Time was actually, by the maths, relative.
Mind.
Blown.
I took a fair amount of hallucinogens in my 20s, which taught me that even my minute to minute experience of time could be lived unmoored from that linear expression, if only for its own isolated period.
I’ve done pretty well with time as an adult, although I had to let go of the idea that I would experience it in consistent ways. I’ve learned how to lean into the times when my brain races, and thoughts come quickly. I’ve learned to lean into the times when moments expand and all thoughts of next flee. And I’ve learned to be on time for other people’s schedules.
My view of time as a connectable set of puzzle pieces is generally useful. But it absolutely fell apart when we went into lockdown in the Spring of 2020. Now that I consider it all more carefully, I can almost remember feeling when these time constructs came tumbling down around me. If my spiritual community, Living Waters Community Church, Denver, hadn’t met every Tuesday night but one throughout this whole thing, I am not sure I’d have known when it was whenever it was that time at all ever.
About a year and a half ago, I started writing this blog again on a weekly basis. That routine helped me re-establish some sense of time. A few months later, we added weekly prayers, and in 2022 we added a weekly newsletter. All of that has helped me re-construct a working ability to comprehend time and how it is moving around us.
I know many of us are experiencing similar foldings and warping of time. I’ve seen many memes that express various aspects of this: Ten years ago was either the 90s or March; 2016 lasted 4 years; Obama’s Presidency was ‘just last week’ although he’s been out of office almost as long as he was in.
It seems this time discombobulation is a common experience, which is no surprise. The brain produces neuro-chemicals which fuzz our memories in times of trauma. It’s said that this is why women have a second child. The pain of childbirth doesn’t fully translate in memory. I can remember the sound of my leg bones cracking 15 years ago but I can’t recall the pain at all -just that there was a lot of it.
So maybe we’ve all had our brains flooded with that stuff during this time. Or maybe only some of us have. Or maybe all of us have experienced a little bit of this fungibility, this movability and relative nature of time itself.
For me in my life it has been important to have this changing and shifting comprehension of time. It has freed me both simply to be in an experience, and to juggle, compress, and expand time as needed. As I primarily work in the climate justice world, and that is a world made up almost completely of immediate tasks that all require long time spans, the graciousness of unfolding, in order to be successful and sustainable. It’s a familiar time paradox, and an understanding that I am working to articulate well enough to share. I am forming new disciplines of ordering time, of structures and mechanics that work for me, and perhaps can be useful for others.
May it be so.