Three years removed from those eerie and strange days of the early pandemic, one thing that strikes us is how much time we seemed to have then. People were picking up hobbies, slow cooking elaborate meals on the groceries they could get. People found their jobs that used to keep them late at the office could be finished in a couple hours. People were reading philosophy and zipping through books. There was no business travel, no long days on the road. The days blurred into each other, but there seemed to be infinite space for chatting with friends and family over Zoom, catching up on TV series we missed.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. But it sure felt like there was a lot of time.
Today, with life back to ‘normal,’ all that seems very far away. Where did all that time go? How are we suddenly so much busier? There are the same 24 hours in a day, but somehow we’re rushed, everything is sped up, those hobbies, those meandering catch ups and calls have fallen like the COVID case counts. What gives?
Sure, part of it is how the world was paused, but most of it is much simpler: In the midst of a crisis, a lot of things just fell away. We had clarity. Marcus Aurelius would say that the essential question of life was to ask ourselves always whether the things we were doing were in fact essential. Eliminating the inessential created room, he said, to do the essential things better.
We still have the same number of hours in the day, but our sense of clarity is gone. Our priorities have slipped. We’re saying ‘Yes’ to things that lockdowns and protocols and ‘flattening the curve’ said ‘NO’ to for us during the pandemic. Much of this stuff is wonderful–seeing friends in person, taking our kids to and from school, for example–but a lot of it is not. A lot of it is a waste. A lot of it is inessential.
We can go back to living in that moment any time we like. We have all the time in the world we need to be productive, philosophical, purposeful. We just have to seize it. We just have to be disciplined about it.
