One of the strangest aspects of this lockdown life is the monotony. It’s becoming hard to tell one week from another, or even to judge how long this season has lasted.
The reason for this monotony is not immediately obvious. It’s not necessarily down to a lack of busyness, since many are working just as hard, or harder. Nor is it down to working from home, since that was true for many (myself included) prior to lockdown. So, what is it?
I had a moment of realisation reading two beautiful paragraphs in David Gibson’s book, Living Life Backward. He is commenting on that most famous of passages in Ecclesiastes: ‘For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die… a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance… a time to love, and a time to hate…’ (see Ecclesiastes 2.1–8).
Gibson sheds light on this by helping us understand how we, as humans, measure time:
Observe as well how the combined effect of the poem puts flesh on the skeleton of a human life. There are seasons in the world that act upon us (war and peace), but almost every pair in the poem involves our connectedness to others between the moments of our birth and death. We are profoundly relational beings, and most of the seasons of our lives are taken up with navigating the different stages of our relationships and the effects they have on us. We dance at a wedding, and we mourn the loss of the one we danced with. We laugh together, and we weep for what the people we used to laugh with have done to us. Without thinking, we reach out and touch, but we instinctively respect a different emotional and physical boundary with someone else. We grow to love some people and come to hate others.
If we were somehow to take the seasons of life out of the web of relationships in which we are enmeshed, our lives would become flat and monotonous. We check our calendars every day, but we don’t set the seasons of life just by the patterns of the sun and the moon. Rather, our times are marked by being a daughter and a sister, becoming a wife and a lover, then a mother and a grandmother, and a widow. These are the seasons God gives. The times he grants are bound to the presence or absence of relationship.
In other words, humans measure time in relationships.
Therefore, lockdown is getting more and more weird because so many of our relationships are on hold. Even if you are interacting with others in all their two-dimensional pixelated glory, this is not the same as relating to them in the flesh. And where there is no real progress or change in relationships, then it seems as though time is standing still.
Of course, there are some very tangible benefits to this season if you have people to share it with. You may well have grown sick of your screens, and reclaimed the art of conversation – the most essentially relational thing a human can enjoy. We can all benefit from sitting till bedtime.
My hope is that when we all come out of hibernation, we will emerge with a renewed commitment to each other. It will feel as though we have left limbo and reentered the land of the living. And perhaps we will be able to bring together the benefits of normal life along with the benefits of lockdown – that is, the freedom to be together physically, and the freedom not to rush anywhere in particular but simply talk.