#SOL20: Two Times: Notes from the Pandemic

Sleep (M.A. Reilly)

Where the two times meet, desperation. Where the two times go their separate ways, contentment. For, miraculously, a barrister, a nurse, a baker can make a world in either time, but not in both times. Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.  Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

I. 

I didn't mean to do this. 

I actually hardly noticed at all, until the skin on the wrist where I normally wore the watch grew dry and tight from so much hand washing.  It was the dry skin that signaled a passing of time.

On the first day of self-imposed isolation, I left my watch sitting next to the bed. Eleven days later, I can say that it hasn't been back on my wrist since. 

II. 

Pandemics reorient us in time in ways similar to what grief does to a body.  In each situation we attempt to lessen the entropy that is felt by heightening what the body feels.

It was body time, not clock time that oriented me to the world. 

III.

After the work meetings now conducted by phone or through ZOOM, or Google Hangout—I meditate.

Dinner is over.

Dishes are done.

The house settles like a contented cat around me.

There is nothing but a single word I learned to chant four years ago, until that word like time and space dissolves.