Weird Time
It has been almost exactly five years since the COVID shutdown happened. And I think I can succinctly summarize how I feel about that with two sentences:
I can’t believe it’s already been five years.
I can’t believe it’s only been five years.
I’m sure we all feel this way. After all, “Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
How about these two sentences instead:
I can’t believe how much the world has changed since before it started.
I can’t believe how much the world is exactly the same as before it started.
Hmm. Better, closer, warmer. And there’s certainly some truth to this. If someone fell asleep in January 2020 and woke up five years later, they’d find: a) Most of the world’s problems haven’t been solved (and we’ve found some new ones); b) Political cycles have come back around (take, for instance, that the US president is the same man now that it was then); c) No one wore masks before, and no one wears masks after; d) There was pressure to come into the office five days a week, and that’s continued; e) We still don’t have the flying cars we were promised as kids.
In other words, you’d never be able to deduce the enormity of what happened during those five years by looking at the periods preceding and following it.
How about this one:
I can’t believe how much of it I remember vividly.
I can’t believe how much of it I’ve already forgotten.
This pair really resonates.
It wasn’t only another time. It was, in many ways, an entirely different existence, on an isolated planet, in a science fiction nightmare. It was a singular experience, accompanied by uncountable, overwhelming tragedy. And then, somehow, it was “gone”.
Isn’t the collective amnesia we’ve experienced fascinating and frightening? Or perhaps it isn’t amnesia as much as a subconsciously intentional forgetfulness.
Yet somehow, in 2020, I had the foresight to realize I wouldn’t remember what it was all like. At the time, long before I started writing this newsletter, I jotted down some thoughts, which I recently stumbled upon. This small bit was part of a broader writing project I’ve since abandoned.
Below is what I wrote, unedited, on March 30, 2020:
Flashback
I am typing these words in late March, 2020, and the world is under lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic. I process the current unusual situation, in which the entire world has found itself, on two different levels. The first is through my eyes today, trying to make sense of it as I look towards an indefinite hazy future that stretches in all directions with uncertainties about quarantine duration, mortality rates, and economic meltdowns. The second level of processing puts my mind far in the future, looking back with perfect clarity at the events of the past, and attempting to convey to my children what life was like when we all lived through the pandemic (including them, although they are much too young now to remember it down the road).
The odd fact of the matter is that, like most everything I’ve lived through, I will forget exactly how I felt at this time. I will never be able to put myself back in this moment, on this couch, writing these words, and wrap my head around the now that will by then be long passed. I don’t even need to look at a very long time horizon to see this realized. The past two weeks alone have brought such rapid evolution of the Coronavirus situation, as well as the world’s perception and reaction to it, that even today I cannot put myself in my own shoes a dozen days back.
Flashforward
Can’t say I know what triggered my writing that. But I’m glad I did write it. And it makes me glad I’m writing regularly now, to illuminate down the road all the ways I was right and all the ways I was wrong and all the many things I’ll certainly forget.
There’s a great quote by philosopher Michel de Montaigne, in which he says, “Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.”
It seems that the opposite is true too. Nothing makes you forget a moment in time faster than attempting to remember.