“We float with the sticks on the stream; helter skelter with the dead leaves on the law, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up—to look, for example, at the sky” (Woolf 12).
Quarantine days come and go in waves. No two are entirely alike but they come and go all the same, moving in and out in steady movements punctuated by an echoing thunder that seems, right now, to present mocking reminders that the next day will be yet another spoke in the turning wheel. The thunder quickly fades into the background, blends into the horizon of oddities that have become a new normal. Each day leaves a little excess as it ends, the white foam that clings to wet sand on a beach when the water recedes. The excess changes every day: a pile of dishes in the sink from the night before, an unfinished essay that needs to be done, the hair bun that’s been tied up since yesterday’s lunchtime cup of Dunkin Donuts Breakfast Blend, and four unread emails.
One would think that time alone would allow for unimpeded time to accomplish things. Gwyneth Paltrow offered up the invaluable, unsolicited advice to her seven million Instagram followers that time in social isolation provides a great opportunity to write a book or learn a language, instrument, and online coding. Such a helpful thing to suggest from the comforts of a $10 million mansion in Los Angeles, isn’t it? Praise be the multimillionaires for their advice. Afterall, what is time if not an allowance to accomplish something? But I digress.
An abundance of unimpeded time might exist in quarantine but the motivation to take hold of that time and use it for something, constructive or otherwise, does not. Time that moves in such a way, punctuated by the ticking of a clock and nothing else, doesn’t allow for it. There’re no markers, no milestones, no meaning. The challenge must be wrestling with the meaninglessness of a construct that no longer provides an infrastructure for a day in a life . Does the life itself no longer exist or is it the time which doesn’t exist? I suppose it doesn't matter. We’re not free from time. Rather, we’re floating along, broken sticks on a stream that continues to move without our consent.
The sky is still here, though. Has anyone noticed it’s stayed the same in quarantine? But the idleness that might exist when one is ill and unable to leave their bed doesn’t exist here. There is always something that should be done or could be done. The time is there to stare at the sky, or the ceiling, and find patterns in the clouds or popcorn texture speckled along the drywall (I have found several in the last few hours- two llamas, a storm cloud, and a string of Christmas lights) but there isn’t time to enjoy it guilt-free. Time isn’t necessarily my own simply because I have an abundance of it. Maybe that’s the only difference between time in and out of isolation. Time outside of isolation, the time kept by alarms and clocks and appointments and obligations, cannot be ignored. That kind of time is a schedule which must be kept.
But time in isolation isn’t bound by the same pressures—that’s where the struggle lies. The pressure everyday life puts on someone is misappropriated as motivation. It’s the driving force which keeps us moving forward through the world, through our day, through time itself. Is this what happens to me without the motivating presence of constant, obvious pressure? Do I turn into a voided space?
Maybe a mind is no different than a body: one in motion stays in motion. Maybe to get through quarantine days, one must become like a bodysurfer; loose and open to the inertia of the waves but never drowning below the surface.
Works Cited
Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2002. 3-28. Print.