“…time is always borrowed, and that the lending agency exacts its premium precisely when we are least prepared to pay and need to borrow more…” -André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
It seems like lately everything simultaneously moves incredibly fast while feeling slow in the moment. We all spent at least 5 months in one place after the pandemic hit the U.S. in March. Is it just me, or did those 5 months feel like years while they were happening, but now – since coming back to campus – it seems like there’s absolutely no way it was 5 entire months of isolation?
I’ve always said this to my friends and family: every year seems to go faster. Maybe it’s because as we get older we become busier, we have less time to pass wondering what to do, because our schedules are filled with things we have to do. But how does that explain the contrasting feelings we may have towards “quarantine?” I think what it boils down to, at least in some capacity, is that in the time we were all quarantining, we finally had “free time” again. We once again found ourselves with buckets of time that we didn’t know what to do with, and what a lot of us found ourselves doing was essentially waking up to a lot of problems our normal lives had kept us oblivious to.
With all of the time we had on our hands, we had more time to read the news, to see the atrocities in the world we live in. Many people were already aware of them, but I personally did not realize the severity of some of these issues until my life got put on pause and the happy little bubble I’d been living in was popped by a stay-at-home order.
I think many of us agree that 2020 has been a garbage fire of epic proportions, but the kicker is that none of the problems we’re facing right now are new. We simply have had time to actually pay attention to political, social, and economic issues that have been simmering under the surface of normal life for decades. How does this relate to the mysterious qualities of time? Because in about 5 or 6 months, our society has had an awakening that’s led to what looks like what could be the beginning of a social revolution.
Every day that has passed from March 13th to August 22nd felt so incredibly long and draining, each day was a year long, and each “year” brought more upsetting headlines, more scandals in pop culture, and of course new memes. In the age of social media, our culture moves from trend to trend so quickly, even under normal circumstances. But again, with all the time we had in quarantine, we had lots of time to spend scrolling through apps. People climbed to fame and went viral just as quickly as they were cancelled, apology videos went up, forgiveness was sometimes granted, and then the cycle repeated itself.
It feels like there is no way only 5 months passed by where so many of us didn’t see our friends, rarely left the house, and jumped at the opportunity to take walks around our neighborhoods just to feel something. Yet it feels like there is no way we really did that for 5 entire months, either. We have swallowed down emotions of anger, confusion, and sadness in amounts that caused an emotional overdose; the entirety of 2020 has felt like a fever dream because our society has faced so much change in such a short amount of time.