Wrestling Without An Audience

I’ve always felt we need to add a disclaimer when we teach children how to tell the time. I think we need to make it clear to them that we created the big hand and the little hand. We even came up with the terror that is the quickly moving second hand. The most accurate measurement of ageing there is. We need to tell our children that we put twenty four hours in a day and seven days in a week. It was us who put three hundred and sixty five (ish) days in a year. We did that. Not the universe. Not any particular deity or force. Not the dinosaurs, although that would’ve made learning to tell the time way more fun. We created the concept. It’s not like the first person who came out of the trees found a clock waiting for them at the bottom.

Time is there to make sure the trains run properly. It’s there to allow us to control our experiences, to understand when we’re meant to be eating or attending a meeting or going to bed. Time is a measurement, just like distance. We innately understand if it’s a long way from where we are to where we need to go. We don’t necessarily have to put a number on it. Still, we created measurements so we can apply rulers and tape measures to tell you how tall or short something is. How far away it is. It doesn’t change the fact in any way, it just adds detail.

Time and distance have become oddly toxic to our mental well being in 2020. I think the odds are pretty high that, as most of us welcomed in the new year nearly four months ago, we didn’t realise events halfway around the world were about to stampede through our streets and hospitals. Even as the news began to talk about China in January, we didn’t quite understand the scale of what was coming. Now, here we are, time and space making far less sense than they did a month ago. If it was a month. Who can even tell anymore?

Between the clocks changing and the ever shifting Easter bank holiday, the days don’t mean a whole lot to some of us now. If you’re on furlough, then you’re living in Limbo Land, where weekdays feel like weekends. Where weekends feel like Tuesday. Where Friday night can feel like any other night.

There might be names in the boxes on our calendars. There might be numbers on the faces of our clocks, but none of them tell us exactly what we want to know. It’s no longer a case of how long have we been like this. What we really want to know is when will this end. We want a countdown to normality.

Of course, when normality does come back to visit, we’ll need it to stand a few steps back before we can open the door and say hi.

Time feels particularly strange for me today. You see, this is the last day of my thirties. Tomorrow I hit the next mile marker. The Big Four O. I’ve passed a few of its younger siblings already. Sixteen, eighteen, twenty one. Thirty. My wife took me to New York for my thirtieth. You might remember 2010 was the year when an Icelandic volcano ground air travel to a complete halt. So, how did we get to New York? Well, we were lucky. Unbelievably lucky. That volcano stopped to let us fly out of the UK and didn’t start up again until after we came home.

Recent events have been far less kind when it comes to the idea of travelling. Let alone, to any great extent, celebrating. Not that I can complain. I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. So far, everyone we know has managed to say healthy through this madness. That’s not a bad birthday present, as far as I’m concerned.

Besides, let’s be honest, the number of candles of your cake means about as much as the numbers on the face of a clock. It’s just that we humans like to divide things. We like to quantify what we have and what we have left. Hence our obsession with milestone ages.

I’ve seen plenty of cards that suggest life begins at forty. Looking back over the past thirty nine years, I seem to have achieved quite a lot to say I haven’t started yet. I met the love of my life. We got married. We moved in together. I’ve been lucky enough to stay employed for most of the time. I made some incredible friends along the way and shared time with my family. I even manged to get some stories published and had a few people tell me they enjoyed them. So, if life begins tomorrow, then I hope it realises we’ve already set the bar pretty high.

For now, though, I guess we’ll be staying in the Corona holding pattern. The news on our TVs acting as both an information service and an overactive acceleration chamber. Our health workers proving to us exactly why we should’ve been calling them heroes all along. Our best and brightest working every hour to save our sanity and prove to us that we’re not all waiting to rampage the nearest supermarket after it receives another delivery.

Sure, these are strange times. There’s no doubting that. These are historic, world changing times. Times when we can only see our loved ones on a screen or standing 2 metres away. Times when we have to hope that our combined, weekly applause breaks are enough to express our gratitude for now. Yet I don’t think it’s fair to life will begin again when these times are over. That sounds like you’re trying to wait out limbo. Which isn’t an easy way to live. We need to stay safe. We need to take care of each other. We need to not look at the clock or the news too much. I think, if you do that, then you stand a decent chance of getting through this.

Just try to remember that, even though the world has changed shape, it doesn’t mean it will still this way forever. There are plenty more parties ahead. Some of which will put a slice of cake in front of you.