Pandemic Time

Pandemic time moves fast and slow all at once. It is fleeting and yet it trudges along thick as sludge through a backed-up drain. Every day is the same—blending and melding one into another—stretching into one long month that goes on forever and ever until all of a sudden it is over and no one has a clue where it disappeared to so fast.

Eighteen months of When will this day, week, month, year be over? followed by Where did it go?

Eighteen months measured in baked goods and Netflix.

Eighteen months that feel like eighteen years that feel like eighteen days. Wasn’t it just Christmas? Of 2019?

At first, we were so productive—we got so much done. We started new hobbies and learned new skills. Cleaned out closets that hadn’t been touched in years. Remembered how to bake bread and ran the stores out of yeast. Got outside and reconnected with nature. We missed our old life, but we were making the most of the new one. Spring stretched into summer and we patted ourselves on the back for all that we accomplished, for how well we had adapted.

Now—as summer stretches into fall for its second revolution—time is like spent elastic. Useless. Hanging there by its threads. Pretending to have a purpose. Too much and not enough all at once. A five-minute task pre-pandemic stretches into five hours now, interrupted by distractions we can’t recall five seconds later. Five seconds spent on memes used to turn into five minutes of cat videos, thirty-five at the most. Now it's five hours down a single wormhole and five days without a shower.

Pandemic time is turning our underwear inside out—twice, maybe three times—but not because there isn’t space in our schedules. There just isn’t time.

Pandemic time is looking at the clock one minute and it reads noon, looking a moment later and it’s half past three, but an hour after that the same clock will tell you it is only 3:33.

Pandemic time is a crowded waiting room. The seconds crawl until our number is called, but once it is and we take our turn the day is done.

Pandemic time is the energy to do one thing and one thing only. It is glancing at a screen for a moment only to look away an hour, two hours, half a day later. It is morning routines that used to take but moments stretching into the afternoon. It is a dream come true for the procrastinator inside all of us—until we realize we are stuck in its endless loop, victims of our worst nightmare.

Like all things, when time loses its meaning, its value, it becomes much easier to waste and much harder to reclaim. Living through a pandemic has changed our relation to time—and the question isn’t just can we get it back, but also—do we even want it back? At least how it was anyway.

Are we so stuck in our too-much-not-enough-time-induced ennui that we cannot see beyond it? Or is it simply that we crave something better than rushing rushing rushing all of the time? Is this how we rebel, by wasting it instead?

Perhaps this is our chance to rethink time—how we spend it, what gives it value, what it is worth to us. Maybe this is our opportunity to reorganize and revamp how we treat time in our lives. Do we really need to work forty hours at the expense of everything else? Can we conceive of a life that is more equitable, that allows us to keep more for ourselves? After all—it is our time, pandemic or not.