Sunday, March 15, 2020

The elasticity of time


"Dali" by ChaSanabria is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

I have been checking in by phone, email, and text with friends and family. I wrote this in an email this morning. (Was it just this morning? Not days and days ago?)

While events are moving past us at an unimaginable speed, our individual lives are slowing down dramatically. It's a strange juxtaposition. 

In between obsessive scrolling of Twitter and Facebook, where everything is pressured, there are quiet tasks like stacking wood, walking the dogs, and folding laundry. Those ordinary things have taken on a different weight and meaning now.

While I typically spend a lot of time alone as a writer who works from home, this is different. I have to still my impulse to run to the bakery or the grocery store as much for what I might buy there as to have a social interaction with someone. So I feel the intensity of my isolation differently than when it is created by choice.

It is only Sunday. I have to keep reminding myself of the day and date as a buffer against the sense of unreality and free-floating anxiety. It feels that life has always been this strange disconnect between the urgency of external threat and the slow boredom of internal time.





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2 comments:

  1. I keep finding myself checking the sky for snowstorm that *must* be happening that has confined me to my house. Even though would nopt be going anywhere anyway, the fact that I cannot makes it surreal.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, it feels like a storm warning happening everywhere at once.

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