Pandemia 2020 - Time out of Time

"For many of us it feels as though time has paused...."Christopher Beha, Harpers, Editor's Desk June 2020 issue

Basically how we have become habituated to measuring life is by a schedule set for a station on an assembly line.  The bell rings, or the whistle blows and we march in, go to our stations and count off the boxes filled and sealed, the classes completed, until the bell rings or the whistle blows and you clock out again, the eight hour day, the five day work week, overtime, full-time, part-time, semesters completed, years completed.  We think of our lives in chunks of work, brief glimpses of freedom on a weekend.  

In the "shut down" one of the greatest mass sociology/psychology experiments ever conducted, if not THE greatest, those old ways of 'clocking' the day are gone.  Farmers measured off time by seasons, crop life spans, plowing, sowing, reaping, floods and droughts.  

Now we are forced to contemplate that which is right in front of our faces, closer to the NOW without the distractions that muscled the old work schedule measure of our lives.  

Time for me, definitely has slowed down from an engine hum, to a river flow.  The day slides by in shadows crossing the floor, green illumination outside the windows turning to black and back to particles beams through leaves again.  The only mechanistic measure enforced on my days now is driven by -  my body, the cats to be fed, the dog to be put out, brought it, walked, fed.  Other than that, I am free - to float out on gossamer spider threads that go to the Marianna Trench, or Hallstatt, Germany, or back 50,000 years,  or 50 years.  My mind can get stuck in freedom on information lines, books magazines, movies, and the day drifts by, maybe episode by episode.  

It isn't true that I resented the schedule imposed by all my school and work experiences.  Only a mild resentment, and more a sense of resignation.  This is how it goes, you are given life, but your use of it is carefully structured by others until you grow up and get free.  But then you grow up and you don't get free - you get more and different contingencies and you give over more and more to work time and school time, and career time and domestic time, and parenting time.  No free time.

But, if you are lucky and you grow old enough, you can get free time back, if you are, as I said LUCKY!  By luck, I mean getting into the right trade at the right time, getting lucky in finding yourself in conditions that are positive for your growth and maximization of your potential, you enter a profession that has a retirement plan.  If you are lucky and live long enough to put your 'time' in, you get a pension!  If you were lucky enough to get born after the government under F D R, put in a social security system for the investment of workers towards their retirement, and the present before they get to dismantle it to persecute the weak again.

Now I have the most free time I have ever had.  When I was a child, old enough to go out and play for long periods on my own, I had hours a day of free time.  It was in the days before kids got entirely scheduled up while both parents worked.  When I went home from school, my mother was there and I got changed and went outside to play - along the creek, in the little dark,shady, dell at one end of our street to the large golden meadow on the other end.  Behind us were corn fields, but we didn't go into them.  We hung out, the kids who lived there, and dammed up streams, built forts, ice skated, swam off Tarzan ropes from trees into the polluted creek, and except for going home for dinner and out again, we were free.  We had no lessons, no organized sports.  And in summer, we played all day and even until the stars came out sometimes.  

Now I am free like that again, within the constraints of aging.  There are no places to go, people to see, errands to run, for days and days on end.

Happy trails - physical, metaphysical, meditative or contemplative!
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com