On a recent phone call, my friend got a little panicked when he realized he might have missed a meeting because of our conversation. “What time is it?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I replied. “I don’t even know what day it is.”
We both laughed, a bit ruefully perhaps. But we laughed because no one seems to know what time or day it is any more.
“It is the pandemic,” he said. “It has changed our perception of time. It’s called temporal dislocation — being lost in time.”
I feel time in two ways now — the days feel long, sometimes interminably so. At the beginning of the pandemic, months felt slow, too. But, somewhere along the line, that changed. While days still feel long, the months seem to have flown by. When I turned the calendar page to March and realized we’ve been in this for a year, I understood that I have no sense of where all the months have gone. The pandemic year seems to have dissolved into some haze of Zoom calls, baking, and binge-watching PBS. I go to bed whenever, sleep until whenever (except when I have meetings or tapings), with no real sense of time or day. “Is it Wednesday again?” I sometimes ask my husband. “Or Thursday?”
And it has gotten worse with each passing month. I wondered if I was losing my mind. When my friend named it — temporal dislocation — I actually felt relieved.
Since he mentioned this phenomena, I’ve done some reading about time and perception. Turns out that losing my sense of time in the pandemic isn’t unique. Millions of us are struggling with these feelings, whether we’re completely isolated and bored or busy with meetings and home-schooling. Our sense of time is connected with making memories. People with limited social circles, or who are confined to limited geographies, have fewer external interactions and make fewer memories — and memories enable us to mark time. The issue is sameness — the same computer screen, the same people, the same rooms, same routine — all the sameness of the pandemic — has actually caused the parts of our brains that make memories to go flaccid and has flattened our sense of time.
Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, explains it this way:
This blurring of identical days leads us to create fewer new memories, which is crucial to our sense of time perception. Memories are one of the ways that we judge how much time has passed. When you go on holiday for a week to a new place, the time goes fast while you’re away because everything is new, but when you get home, you look back and have made so many new memories that it often feels as though you’ve been away for far longer than a week.
The opposite can happen in lockdown. Even if the days feels slow, when you get to the end of the week and look back, retrospectively estimating how much time has passed, you have made fewer new memories than usual and time seems to have disappeared. It’s a less extreme version of the experience some people have while in prison or when they’re ill. Time passes painfully slowly and they long for it to be over, but when it is and they look back, time can feel as though it has contracted.
Basically, we’ve been in pandemic prison. For good and needed reasons, of course. But no wonder people are itching to get set free — and that whoops for “freedom” from unhinged right-wing politicians are greeted by cheers from audiences anxious to move on. (The pandemic has me thinking about freedom, too. But that’s another story for another time!)
If you can’t remember time or day, welcome to the pandemic club. Although we’re all jonesing for this to be over, it won’t be over until it is over. So what do we do in the meanwhile? Two suggestions that are helping me:
Develop focus
Many psychologists, therapists, and medical professionals are urging the pandemic-forgetful to practice some form of mindfulness, prayer, meditation, or contemplation as part of a simple, daily routine. One of the best forms of pandemic mindfulness is thoughtful walking — get out of the house, walk around your neighborhood (varying your routine) and notice things. Paying attention to subtle shifts in seasons, gardens in bloom, children playing, houses newly painted, cloud patterns — whatever — sharpens the mind and strengthens pathways of memory.
Mark one day as different
“Making sure the weekdays and the weekends are different enough not to merge into one,” Hammond suggests, “can help with the distortions our new life can have on our perception of time.” Marking Saturdays and Sundays with alternate activities helps with the flow of time. Over the months, I’ve found good options to be staying off of social media on the weekend, not scheduling Zoom meetings, calling a friend for fun, attending a religious service or learning a new spiritual practice, reading, doing crossword puzzles, coloring and drawing, going for a long drive — all things I don’t generally do during the week.
Focus and differentiating days turn out to be among our best tools to orient us temporally — as they both exercise the parts of our brains most closely related to human perception of time.
In the language of faith, “focus” is prayer and “marking a day” is Sabbath keeping! Too often, we imagine such things as old-fashioned burdens or obligations — stuff that religious people do because of tradition or some external command. But if the pandemic has taught us anything, it has reminded us that such spiritual practices are part of deep human wisdom. Long before kitchen clocks and paper calendars, human beings needed things that provided templates for memory and located them in time. Memory and time are the basic elements of meaning and story, and we humans are inveterate meaning-makers and story-tellers. And that’s part of the reason why the pandemic has been so very hard — it has eroded our capacities for meaning and story. Without them, we feel lost.
We can, however, reclaim this time. It wasn’t wasted. It wasn’t meaningless. There will be stories to tell. Soon — and I hope very soon — it will be over. I’m looking forward to new things to remember, for a more normal flow of time. Until then, we can practice temporal relocation — and keep ourselves spiritually fit and ready to make memories when the time comes.
Reflection Questions:
Have you experienced a sense of temporal dislocation?
What are you doing to maintain focus during the pandemic?
Do you have a “sabbath”? What marks a day as different or special for you?
Are there particular memories you have of the pandemic? Some events that enable you to recall the flow of time? (Such memories may be hard, so please be gentle with yourself!)
INSPIRATION:
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
—Exodus 20: 8-11
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
—T.S. Eliot, from Burnt Norton
EVENTS:
March 11 - April 22:
FRANCISCAN CENTER: Guided Conversation on Grateful
April 26:
BREATHE: Making sense of the past year, finding hope for the future
This one-day virtual gathering is for women in spiritual leadership (trans women and non-binary persons who are comfortable in women-focussed events are - of course - welcome) – clergy, spiritual directors, lay leaders, authors and poets, and teachers – to catch our breath after this difficult and challenging year.
Breathe is an opportunity for you to be encouraged, affirmed, and to connect with others from across the country. Together, we'll find new grounding for the final stretch of the pandemic. The gathering will allow time to reflect on what's happened to us in the last year, and open our hearts toward a new phase in our lives and ministries.
FREEING JESUS comes out on March 30!
Book events will be announced shortly, keep an eye out for the celebration and conversations. For more info and pre-ordering, click here.
For booking events, including events based on my upcoming book, Freeing Jesus, please contact Chaffee Management. We’re booking virtual events through spring 2021, and blended and in-real-life events for later 2021 and into 2022.
For podcast, media, review, and interview inquires and availability regarding the book launch, please email Dan Rovzar at HarperCollins publicity: Dan.Rovzar@harpercollins.com.
There's a name for it! So much of this rang true to me and is helping me understand what I'm experiencing!
Thank you Diana. On so many levels, this past year has been unnerving. We can all count our individual challenges. To me, it feels like I've been in "the dark hallway" and unable to find a door or window to escape through. As I ran up and down my narrow path, I found myself tripping over something. OUCH! Frustrated and exhausting, I collapsed. To my surprise, I fell into a "holy chair" that God had placed there for me to rest and refocus. What I discovered was that when I was willing to pause and sink into God's loving arms, both calm and peace and clarity returned. From there, new light beamed into my frightening space and doors opened that I never would have imagined for myself. Once again I am reminded of my guiding mantra, "above all, trust in the slow work of God."