I remember the week time stopped. It was 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, and we had just gone into quarantine. Country after country shut down. Photos of the great cities of the world showed empty streets, businesses shuttered, schools closed. Our radio staff packed up and went home and in the days that followed, my entire relationship with time changed. At first, it was incredibly liberating, like an expanse of endless snow days. I still had work to do – interviews to book, scripts to write, meals to make – but the regimentation of my days, a structure so established I had barely noticed it, was gone. I could set my own hours, wake at 4 AM and work until 8, spend 4 hours knitting or walking or reading, then work another 3 hours before bed.
But as weeks and months passed, I began to feel unmoored – drifting through life, as days flowed formlessly by. Meanwhile, fear loomed everywhere. Hospitalizations soared and morgues overflowed.The big doomsday clock of mortality had never beat so loudly before. We all heard it.
When the pandemic waned, I didn’t want to go back to my old regimented life on the clock. No one did. I think that’s the real reason no one wants to go back to the office – we don’t want to return to the tyranny of time. And yet, living in the shadow of death has made us more aware of time than ever before. We now have an extraordinary opportunity, as a culture, to create something new – a different relationship with time. What should it – what could it – be like? This is a question we’ll be exploring in the months to come in a new 4-part series starting June 3, called Deep Time.
– Anne