The Strangeness of Pandemic Time
Slowly, then all at once
Photo by Stas Knop from Pexels
Pandemic time is brutally inconsistent. It marks the midpoint of slowly, then all at once—it’s the comma, the pause, the preventive delay in the wound-up clock reaching its alarming point, after which the world speeds down to destruction.
What were only inevitable a few years back are happening now as an avalanche of consequences. “Inevitable” feels like a distant word when the future is crashing onto the present, and crushing it. The future is now because there’s no future. The present—the midpoint, the boundary, the pause between “slowly” and “all at once”—is thinning, if not yet altogether gone. The accumulated past is being brought face-to-face with its aftermath that the present had been holding back for so long. Had. I can’t help but speak like the present is already the past.
The pandemic is a risk maximizer par excellence. It didn’t just show how illusory this boundary of the present is, or how like a traitor the present had created space between cause and consequence, disjoining them. In this space, those who were responsible procrastinated, accumulated more cause for direr consequences as though for inevitable futures farther away. But the pandemic broke the present down and let the future in. It exposed broken systems and malicious intents to the point of obscenity, driving problematic processes to their sudden eventuality.
The pandemic brutally collapsed the past into its fate.
Outside, the world is hurrying to its death. But inside the locked down home, time is very, very slow.
When in-person classes were suspended, this overworked teacher was secretly, guiltily happy. The impossible happened: time stopped. Deadlines were paused. The rat race was cancelled.
The present was emptied, and then prolonged. Even if only for an eternity while.
Space opened up for breathing, for catching up. The books I can finally, leisurely read! The papers I can write with a freely wandering mind! The courses I can adequately, decently plan for! I gazed back at my stack of books with a greedy longing, or a premature sense of triumph. They had been gazing at me with contempt these many months, unopened or barely browsed.
The future I had fantasized for reading and writing unexpectedly arrived.
Three months later, I haven’t read, written, done anything. Did time turn glacial? When classes reopened as online windows to a world on fire, I was caught still frozen to my seat.
Where did the time go? Those three months breezed by, yet I was minutely aware of it all, in cinematic slow motion. Every memory, every sensation, caught in a series of stills. Space caught time, slowed it, imprinted it.
When it all started, my son Joaquin had no desire to crawl. He’d cry whenever I placed him on the floor. He’d cry his lungs out as he dragged himself back to bed, forced to crawl all the way. Then something clicked in his brain. He suddenly understood space—near, far, up, down—and crawled out of bed, out of the room. I caught the moment, consigned as I’d been to work from home.
In slow days that might have really been weeks, months, I watched Joaquin stand and scoot along the walls. He toddled like his legs were gonna give. I saw his legs, which were bowed, straighten through these days, weeks, months that I was microscopically aware of. Time enlarged looked like grains of sand falling soundlessly in the hourglass—the metaphor is real.
Joaquin was soon climbing on furniture and I would notice his every subtle attempt to jump, his every new milestone. In the hourglass were too many grains like tiny milestones. When you could feel time this minutely, there was suddenly too much when you could discretely count the grain—and all of them count, each grain ingrained with memory. But like loose sand still they flowed out, slipped by, just as fast.
What is space?
Space is not the inert container in which time—and history, and memory—happens. Space is the gap between minutes, seconds, nanoseconds. Space is the present between future and past.
Outside, the present has mostly disappeared, overrun by the future-on-hand. Space is tight outside, with barely any wiggle room for mitigating the effects of poorly made choices in the past. But inside the home, it’s a perpetual present. My school-age daughter Dione is home from school, I am home from school. As I weep for novels I planned to read but couldn’t, I teach her, this teacher who teaches other kids but not her own children. I’ve been reading far too many books, far too many children’s lives, but not my own children’s lives, till space opened and collapsed their lives into mine.
Pandemic time is anyway weird, so maybe, like a miracle, I will be able to juggle everything and not lose my mind. Even as my country is seriously losing it, and I feel so silly weeping for novels I wanted to read but couldn’t. There is so much more to weep for: the healthcare system collapsing, the economy collapsing, the heartlessness of regimes exposed like deep, gaping wounds. Time is running out. But in the home, like a miracle, I’m making up for lost, lived time.
For the sake of a future I cannot see, I’ll work, I’ll mother. I’ll wash the laundry with my husband who’s now jobless and mostly home too, catching up on our married years lost to work and parenting. I’ll train my eyes to the minutely slow present, even as we stretch not just time but every means left to live—money, food, and the wits to reset and find other ways to earn without alienating what matters to us the most. To re-wound the clock and begin the healing of wounds.
As the world is being overcome by a dismal future that is now, the real present is still present in pockets of suspended time, in spaces like homes. There’s still time to change, to make up, to catch up.
I’ll count the grains and pretend that the world outside is not spinning just so I could function, live, and like a miracle, outlive this. When we do, when we all do and come out as renewed—when we slowly emerge, and then all at once—we hope the world to be just as new.
With a brand new present, and a less frightening future.
A slightly different version of this first appeared here, August 20, 2021.