On the slowness of days…
“What month is it?” I ask myself. In a seemingly perpetual state of lock-down, physical & mental, when every day looks the same, you lose track of the days and keep wondering what day of the week is it. As days dissolve into each other, leaving me with a blurry sense of time, I have graduated to asking ‘What month is it?’. Well, if things continue like this, maybe I will start asking ‘What year is it?’.
Our perception of time is not just biased; it is terribly flawed. Days drag on, but months breeze through and years fly by. It’s July, I answer my own question. It’s the 5th month of lock-down, doesn’t feel that way though. It’s like an unending story we are a part of, the script goes on but it feels like you are stuck at the start. In the beginning, it seemed to be a temporary thing, but now it has become a way of life and we are adapting and evolving with the changed times. Yet when you look back there isn’t much that has changed after the initial bout of change.
We started picking up new things, some became chefs pretending to make a new dish every day till the reality dawned on them that their food shouldn’t just look good in photos but also taste good, others became singers belting out new tunes, till someone thankfully asked them to stop, while some others, well they just bucked the trend to do nothing, absolutely nothing new. We all got into a routine…in a routine of doing new things. Paradoxical, isn’t it. We were trapped in this routine yet these new things were meant to be liberating. Like being on a treadmill, we are in a motion but ain’t going anywhere.
We made new connections, we re-established old connections. We could not meet, but virtually we did. Yet when we talked, we all had the same conversations. Over a period of time, you couldn’t tell the difference between conversations with a friend and a relative, they all sounded the same. We talked about how rosy our life was before (like it really was) and how it had come to a standstill, we talked about how work had spilled over physically into our personal lives, crowding out the ‘personal’ from our lives. For the statistics-inclined, we discussed the count of corona cases and how the situation just seemed to be worsening, some would venture to make predictions on the future count. We also discussed how our PM’s appearance on national TV sent a collective shiver down our spines and how he always seemed to have tricks up his sleeve to catch us by surprise, howsoever prepared we might be. New people and same talk, new connections and old vibes.
We swing between extremes. The slowness of days makes us restless while the fast-pace of years makes us dizzy and nervous. We worry about the future, about what it holds for us, yet we don’t want to live in the present and want to move on. We count the days, but forget to live them. We approach future with both eagerness and trepidation.
Every day we get up, pick up our arms and go to battle with monotony, at sundown we retire our arms, nurse our wounds and seek comfort in bed, only to be woken up the next day by the eager sun and the whole cycle starts all over again. We have become numb to the sameness of everyday life. Or the monotony of daily life has clouded our vision so much that we fail to recognize the difference or absence of it, in our days. When it comes to the flow of time, our mind plays trick. Or maybe, it is being played.
