The day the world went into pandemic lockdown, my wrist watch stopped. Its battery ran out. That evening I dug into my jewelry box and found two other watches, neither of them worked either.
I condsidered ordering batteries online and figuring out how to change them myself, but what was the point of telling time if I wasn’t going anywhere?
Fifteen months later, fully vaccinated and on week three of my slow reentry into physical human community, I went to Sears wearing the watch that was frozen in 2020. The store was ghostly empty. An entire section in the middle was cleared of merchandise. When the service attendant handed back the watch, time had fast forwarded.
A lot of things stopped in 2020, but time wasn’t one of them. Four million recent graves, shortages of every kind, unemployment and inflation, and disposable masks littering parking lots prove it.
But lots of normal, life-giving things did stop. Like buying watch batteries at the mall, seeing loved ones, and going to church, work, or school. Exercise classes, shopping, concerts, and eating out stopped. Lives ended and began, and loved ones couldn’t be there to grieve or rejoice.
Those who could sat at home wrestling fears and enduring online interactions of every kind. Many made frightening choices in order to care for the rest of us or their own families. Many struggled to keep or find jobs. Sanity was challenged as we watched our world go out of control.
For a while, we gave ourselves over to the power of the mind. The best minds labored day and night to create safe vaccines and keep civilization going. The worst minds spread fear and panic and lies. Everyone suffered. Everyone lost.
The stopped watch that sat on my dresser for over a year reminded me to shut down the digital world from time to time. It reminded me that the world existed before the digital age. It existed long before clocks and humans. Without us and our inventions, the creatures of the world know what to do and when to do it. They sense when to eat, sleep, plant seeds, follow herds, migrate. We used to know too.
The pandemic didn’t send us all home to rest, reflect, and remember. We plunged head first, full body into cyberspace. When the world as we knew it became unlivable, we moved into the virtual world. It was a matter of survival. We kept moving, going, living two lives in one, but we were outside of reality. Time compressed, magnified, and went out of whack. The watches of the world didn’t just stop. They couldn’t keep up.
It’s time to be at home in the real world again. A world where for maybe a month or so in 2020 dolphins swam nearer to shore and deer wandered across city streets.
-June 9, 2021
Radiance Within 