As we’ve moved into the shocking events of March one of my central experiences has been what I would call time dilation. My experience of the passage of time has changed radically. Some of this is the mundane fact that many of the markers of my daily life are falling away or shifting — getting the kids out the door in the morning, getting up and going to work, hitting the gym in the afternoon, various small trips around my neighborhood. Far more though it is what I suspect many of you have experienced: an escalating series of events none of us have any lived experience with and which most of us, I think, could scarcely imagine would ever happen. What’s unthinkable Thursday is quaint by Sunday. Such rapid shifts in our perceptions of the world and reality we’re living in are profoundly disorienting. I suspect more disorienting than many of us yet understand simply because there’s no respite from the rush of events.
Continue reading “Placing Ourselves in Time in A World We Never Imagined”