I'm running late

I don’t know about you, but I can’t seem to manage time well right now.

I remember those first months of lockdown, after the WHO declared a global pandemic. We scrambled to set up home offices and dining room schoolrooms. We washed our groceries (remember that?), and breathed a sigh of relief when we were told it was airborne but oh wait, now it’s masks and creating pods and waving to neighbors we hardly talked to before as we take our walks to escape the house and its crowd of people/its emptiness.

And I remember how we lost track of time.

Work flows changed so much, and one day was stunningly like the next, and we no longer rely on the TV Guide and network television to tell us what day it is. Hours melted into one another, and days simultaneously flew by and crawled as though we were in slo-mo.

What we didn’t quite understand then was the trauma we were experiencing was causing some of that displacement of time. We knew we were feeling not right (a fifth-century monk named John Cassian coined the term 'acedia’ to describe the effects of separation and drudgery of monastic life, which fit well for the lockdown period too) - but I don’t know that we quite understood at the time the role this collective trauma was having on our sense of time and place. For some of us, it changed us for a very long time, even after the vaccines and the slow return to a life outside our homes.

Something shook us and caused a displacement in our relationship to time.

And just as we were finding our footing, learning how to be safe out in the world, interacting again and feeling a sense of connection…well, on January 20th of this year, we started being intentionally traumatized by what a viral TikTok song calls ‘a hostile government takeover’.

More anxiety. A LOT of displacement. A lot of outright fear. A lot of anger. A call to resist and a fear that not enough is happening or can happen to stop it.

So now our bodies are back in that weird place of not just individual but collective trauma, and that whole effect on our sense of time is back.

And it’s frustrating.

So this is a very long way to say give people a break if they underestimate the time it takes to do a thing, or are running late, or worship runs over, or meetings get moved a few times.

Grace matters more than ever right now. We’re living in an impossible timeline, but here we are, and the only way we are going to get through it is with infinite grace for each other, and solid commitment to meet the moment with our resistance and resolve to not let evil win.

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