How coronavirus has changed our perception of time.
Quickly without looking in the calendar tell what is the day today or how many weeks have passed since you have been in quarantine? If you hesitated a little or were unsure about the correct answer then don’t think that you are alone, most of us have gone through the same phase. This COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives completely. our mobility is severely restricted and this crisis has disrupted the ‘Temporal agency ‘ that is our ability to maintain, manage, structure, and manipulate our experience of time. Uncertainty has taken over, a feeling of being stuck and unable to plan anything for the future, is what is happening right now. We don’t know exactly when will we meet our friend's family and other loved ones, when will we go out on a vacay or when will we go out to eat in our favorite restaurant. For a moment this time can feel like something that drags forever yet somehow these past few weeks have gone by with a blink of an eye this happened as our sense of time has broken but that doesn’t stop the hours and week from coming to tick well even if we don’t work the clock has to function. It is said that we humans tend to know what day or what time of the month is going on by the variety of events that take place, which almost seems to be very less these days. Time experience is different for every individual. Boredom often tends to breed a sense of hopelessness with no beginning or end of sight. There are some who have been counting days spent in quarantine which is as maddening as being too busy to notice what time of day it is.
‘Corona time” consists of different times such as ‘time of lockdown’, ‘quarantine time ‘, and ‘work office time’ these new attachments are now a part in almost every household. Leo Tolstoy said ‘the two most powerful warriors are patience and time’ these hard times will pass soon with patience we can achieve anything and utilizing the time will help us succeed. We kill time, we rob and get robbed of time, we waste time, we lose time, we have all the time in the world but no one has the power to stop the time.
“Time” has become a stand-in for all that we cannot control. We are scared this might never end. We are scared it might end too soon. Our experiences of corona time have given us training in temporal thought and have made us somewhat malleable. Even when we feel stuck in the present. “There are different parts of the brain responsible for our long-term, or retrospective judgment of time, versus the way we judge the short term, minute by minute or hour by hour passage of time,” said Berlin. So even though the minutes linger on for people struggling with boredom during quarantine, nothing actually happens as the weeks go by. The conflict between short term and long-term time perception then causes a shock of whiplash, when you realize that while you were languishing in all that nothingness, spring had arrived without you even noticing. On the other hand, those who are too busy to pay attention to the passage of time look back and are reminded of everything they had to do in such a short span of time. It all feels like it happened a lifetime ago. When all is said and done, quarantine time will come to a halt and will settle. We will adapt. But we’ll also be changed forever. Learning how to adapt it and to be OK with it now is at least one way we can prepare for our uncertain future.
