The sun rises. The clock ticks. The calendar counts.
Yet life remains still.
The calendar embodies what the mind has almost given up trying to understand. The days go by but the monotony of a new and stoic routine has paralyzed the conscience. The mind that used to think about the future hasn’t in a while. Thinking about the future seems a futile effort anyway as it remains undefined. The mind no longer finds it pertinent to think about the future. And soon maybe nothing else.
Even if one forces oneself to think about the undefined future there is little beyond wild imagination, an odd exercise for someone whose livelihood demands a solid grounding in reality. How could anyone possibly know what the post-lockdown world will look like? When might we get there? When will we feel like things have returned to normal? What would normal even mean in the aftermath? Who will live to see it?
While life remains on pause, the mind grapples simultaneously with the interruption of daily routines and the more jarring experience of cancelled future plans. Plans that are not just rescheduled but are cancelled indefinitely. At the same time there are daily reminders that despite the stillness of one’s own world, the outside world is increasingly marked by sickness and death. Numbers of both keep rising. Governments are ordering body bags in anticipation of funeral parlors becoming overwhelmed. Occasional ambulances in the distance remind of human life outside the house but also of human frailty. Indefinite curfew continues.
Living life on pause is calmly unsettling. In the immediate aftermath there is a sense of relief over freedom from work or strict routines. Few (other than essential service people, of course) are expected to be anywhere at anytime on any day. There’s a momentary celebration of the reclamation of autonomous decision-making in one’s usually over-controlled life albeit in confined conditions.
Over time, though, this brief interlude in the business of living is interrupted by a single thought: what comes next? It paralyzes the mind, which has just started to embrace the ambivalence of the new normal while rejecting, or at the very least accepting the discontinuation of, previous obligations. The thought disrupts that embrace. It then sets in motion a series of questions that are beyond any conceivable understanding or answer. Stream of consciousness, the very hallmark of the mind’s successes in creativity thus far, runs wildly and madly out of control.
Then the sun sets. The world goes dark. Street lights come on. Soon it will be morning again.
