Time
Covid has done a Jedi Mind trick on time, making it creep for some and disappear for others. At the very least, it’s distorted how we see our days. It has long been an on-again, off-again lover-- this mysterious sidekick we call Time-- the one we can’t get enough of, the one we beg to go. The one that’s rarely, if ever, doing what we think it should. Funny how much we ignore it until we have too much or not enough.
When Covid pounced in for the first time—in a mainstream kind of way—I was on a bus with my team just rolling into Kansas City for the 2020 Big 12 tournament. We started hearing about some potential precautions being made at various events across the country in response to the threat of this mysterious disease we’d barely heard of and didn’t understand, but we thought it was fantasy land. Like the literal stockpiling of massive food and ammo that some people committed to for Y2K, taking action was not something ‘normal’ people would ever actually do.
By the time we got rushed through the wanding for entry into Municipal Auditorium for our practice, though, you could feel the threads of the sweater unraveling even though you couldn’t see it, and nobody told you that it was. While sitting at the dais of the mandatory press conference immediately following practice, I found out it was real. The decision was made by the ‘powers that be’ to limit fans for the conference tournament on both the men’s and women’s sides. Any questions about our team or the upcoming game were swallowed up by the jagged ones about the unknown. It was so strange and shapeless, the professional question askers couldn’t even really figure out what to ask. I felt like I was in a foreign film that I hadn’t read the script of. The air reminded me of Oklahoma on the day a tornado comes.
Any questions about our team or the upcoming game were swallowed up by the jagged ones about the unknown. It was so strange and shapeless, the professional question askers couldn’t even really figure out what to ask. I felt like I was in a foreign film that I hadn’t read the script of.
Later that night after checking all the ‘in case’ boxes with my athletic director and my team, I sat in my hotel room bed watching film on my laptop and the NBA on tv. That’s when the news broke that the OKC Thunder game had been canceled and people were all exiting the arena only minutes prior to tip. Clearly the much adieu had been about something.
And all anybody anywhere wanted was answers. The things nobody had.
Decisions about what to do next came fast and furious, with plans changing as quickly as they were made. One thing was for certain though: we were going home, immediately if not sooner, as Kansas City was ‘locking down’. (A term that felt so strangely governmental at the time and now feels, oddly enough, so everyday.) The hotel lobby buzzed as televisions blared and phones dinged, all full of nothingness because nothing was all we had at the time. Pregnant conjecture. It took up whatever space in the lobby wasn’t crammed with people and bags. I remember some players’ parents being so angry, because all I could tell them was “I don’t know.” One mother looked at me like she thought I’d swallowed the combination to her daughter’s locker as a way of keeping her out. Eventually, we boarded a bus headed for Norman, not knowing that time had been lassoed by a culprit who would refuse to let it go.
But this isn’t a diatribe on the pandemic. It’s a story about the number it did on time.
We all remember where we were when the world stopped turning in 2020—much the way we remember where we were when the twin towers came tumbling down, or when the Oklahoma City Murrah Building imploded, or when JFK was shot. The stamp is in indelible ink. But after that it gets swervy, like that space in between here and there when the dentist gives you the stuff to make the world go away. Right before it’s really good, for just a second, there’s an ‘uh oh’ that feels like the edge of panic. That’s where we’ve all been now, for going on two years. Suspended in ‘uh oh’. Dizzy in the jet wash of Covid 19 and all the cast of characters it continues to unveil like tiny nesting dolls.
It’s as if in our memory there’s a gap. Just this giant blank space where the natural cadence of our lives got hijacked. So even if we can remember what we did, it’s hard to say exactly when. The days run together like syrup. And the order of things is jumbled like a fallen tower of Jenga blocks. Was that last spring or the spring before? Was that in June or April? What year was that again? It’s foggy everywhere when we look back. Covid took our freedom and our confidence, and it also gobbled up the neat little boxes we had around our days.
Time bows to no one and to nothing. It keeps proudly marching, no matter what happens all around it, but our relationship with it has changed. We’re now acutely aware of who’s in charge.
I think we look at it with a little more reverence, these days. A bit more respect. A little more like a teammate that we’re partnering with than a foe with whom we fight. The freedom of this about face--and the power and the peace that come with that-- is a gift, even though it arrived on our doorstep rather poorly wrapped. And the reckoning has reminded us that the sands in the hourglass are sifting, but we have the power to do with them whatever it is that we choose. The days of our lives are the winners here. Their quality stands to shoot through the roof.
And the reckoning has reminded us that the sands in the hourglass are sifting, but we have the power to do with them whatever it is that we choose. The days of our lives are the winners here. Their quality stands to shoot through the roof.
Our new relationship with Time has made us all just a bit more aware, I think. A bit more intentional, a bit less apt to hurry, a bit more present and grateful, perhaps, in big and tiny ways. And not nearly so preoccupied with the ticking of the clock. Maybe we’re learning how to be in cahoots together, us and Father Time.
Maybe at last we’re comfortable enough to sit with it and appreciate it for all it’s ever been—the unwavering drumbeat that gives us permission to spend it as we choose.
Sherri Coale
P.S. Special thanks to Annie Dillard for the succinct reminder…
