Thursday, February 25, 2021

Thursday, 2/25

 Do you even know what day it is any more?

I've been noticing this quite a bit recently. Is it Monday? Is it Wednesday? Is it February? Does it even matter? There are, and I'm not kidding here, days when I wake up, work out, eat breakfast, and go to work, not even knowing the day or date until I get into work and actually have to know that information.

Thankfully, I haven't yet done that on a weekend, but it would not surprise me in the least if it happened.

I can't say I'm surprised by that fact. As we're getting ready to wrap up the 14th month of 2020 the concept of time seems to be a fleeting thing at best. Days and months roll into each other with a steady rhythm, and any concept of time passing in the real world seems to have gone the way of being in a crowd or having a dry cough and not having to worry about it.

I guess, if nothing else, the past 11 months have been an interesting temporal experiment. People are always claiming that time goes by too quickly, and with the lives that we led, pre-pandemic, that was true. But now that we've spent almost an entire year in this warped sense of reality, living a humdrum life and not doing anything exciting that would set one day apart from any other, you get a sense of what life may have been like for people who roamed the savannas 30,00 years ago. They didn't have to get up and go to a job every day. Their job was to get enough food and not get eaten by a tiger. They didn't have a work week and a weekend. Finding food and not getting eaten by a tiger. That was their life day in and day out.

With the exception of not getting eaten by a tiger, a whole lot of people have lived that kind of life the past eleven months.

I can imagine that there are a whole bunch of people who are eager to get back to a life where time just whizzes by, where you wake up Monday morning and, before you know it, it's a Friday night. And I have to admit that there are many times that I wouldn't mind it myself. But I also think it's interesting that we've gotten a glimpse of another kind of life, one where it doesn't matter what day of the week it is.

I don't know if I'd want to live my whole life that way—after all, I really don't need to wake up & go to work, only to discover that it's a Saturday—but it's been an interesting aspect to an interesting year.

(jim@wmqt.com)

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