Is time an illusion?

For most of May with its spectacularly premature good weather, I was in t-shirt and shorts. Then In the first week of June after temperatures plummeted, I suddenly found myself under leaden skies wearing three layers of clothing including a fleece. It’s as if time is going backwards. But, in these crazy days, we’re now living in time has come to a sort a standstill. We’re still getting older of course, but it seems as if every day is the same.

I have a new daily routine. Call it the “new normal” if you like – or whatever BS phrase the marketing executives or hacks have come up with today. The monotony of my average working-from-home day now is broken by regular walks to the local Tesco Express – wearing my home-made face mask crudely cannibalised from an old t-shirt which makes me look like a bandit from a cheesy western – and a daily run around the local park – sometimes in a zig-zag fashion in order to maintain my social distancing.

Jonathan Friedland encapsulates this concept perfectly in a recent Guardian article.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/24/lockdown-time-coronavirus-prisoners

“We want to feel time is precious; we don’t want to write it off. We don’t want to lose a summer that we’ll never get back. we don’t want to do time; we don’t want to be inside. We want to live”.

For many of us there is now little delineation between the various days of the week. Tuesdays are no different from Thursdays. No longer do I have my weekly five-a-side football on Wednesday nights, nor the usual Friday post-work pub meet-up with colleagues, no Saturday morning park runs, etc – I’m sure you get the picture.

We now live in the age of Virtual Pub quizzes and virtual birthday parties on Zoom, office meetings via Microsoft Teams (other online applications are available), re-runs of old football matches on TV and countless other clichés I can’t be bothered to list.

But one day the so-called “new normal” will no longer be new normal. It will no doubt be replaced by a newer normal. And so on…

Time is Slipping Away” by Bennilover is licensed under CC BY-ND

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