Time.

I was talking to the Amanda yesterday about the perception of time during lockdown. I’m on furlough, I said that I think that for people on furlough this will become known as the `long year’. I’ve had a summers worth of sun and gardening. I’m expecting Autumn any minute and yet we are still in meteorological spring. This is a general sense of the passage of time now. I find myself looking at the gardens front and rear, and out in the lanes here-abouts and having this weird disconnect from time relative to plants in season, fledglings of all sorts, emergent spider nests, all the small birds looking in trellises and gutters for those same spiders to feed their chicks, the lack of humidity accompanying the heat of the sun, and hours to fill productively, without spaffing a shedload of cash that might be in short supply later if the firm can’t reopen.

Hectic modern lives are the thing that makes the passage of time seem so swift, with days, weeks, weekends, months, routinely mandated celebrations as milestones of repetition adding to that sense of speed. I think we all knew it, know it. As a pre-amble to retirement, this phase demonstrates that a sudden break with routine will be jarring, and you can understand why fresh retirees sometimes get down in the dumps, and without the right motivation, just decline.

However, I have to say I like this slower pace, boredom can be an issue, as can overworking the middle-aged frame. But the sense that this is a long year and that there is still an entire summer to come, is simultaneously `a bit difficult to get your head round … and a right result’. We’ve been conned into thinking all `the stuff’ we fit into life is what makes life rich. Is it fuck, it’s being in the moment and not seeing your life forever streaming away into the rear view as you hurtle ever forward, ever faster to an end, whilst spending the `now’ wondering why your life recedes quicker than you can account for it, and wondering if you have been short-changed?

I’m reminded of summer holidays as a kid, they were endless. I guess the imponderable question is: how do you manage to attain this state of mind and sense of time, when working life re-starts? Amanda has been back at work for two weeks. She has the opposite issue; time has flown by.