56. TIME ENOUGH AT LAST: Success and Failure During Lockdown
One of my favourite, and many people’s favourite, episodes of the classic TV series, The Twilight Zone (the original Rod Serling one, not the equally enjoyable modern Jordan Peele version), is the episode Time Enough At Last. It’s the end of the world, everybody is dead, and put-upon, Burgess Meredith is the only person left alive. He suddenly discovers he finally has all the time in the world in which to read all the wonderful books he has waited a lifetime to devour only, at the last minute, his glasses fall and break, rendering him unable to see the print. With time enough at last to read, our hero discovers he can’t read a thing.
For many people, it is easy to perceive the lockdowns we experienced due to the coronavirus this year in a similar way. Back in March I’m sure many of us entered the period of forced downtime with all manner of grand plans. I heard people talk about learning a language, writing a novel, taking up a musical instrument or, in my own case, much like in that The Twilight Zone episode, to finally make a dent in all those piles of books I’ve been hoarding for years.
Last week, for me, and many others, despite a few excursions into the real world over the summer, lockdown officially came to an end with the return to work or school. Gone were the endless weeks yawning out in front of me, full of possibility, and gone, therefore, was the fantasy of all the things which might be accomplished in this unexpected chasm of time. As I packed my bag on Monday night, I cast a glance towards the bookshelves. While I have certainly read a lot during the last five and a half months, the pile of graphic novels I set aside for the summer remain unread, as do many of the political philosophy tracts I imagined reading in the garden with an iced coffee in my hand. Those quirky novels bought on a whim, that I saw myself picking up on a rainy day and passing a lazy afternoon with, remain dusty on the windowsill. Before the lockdown came, we had borrowed three books from the local library. As I started the car engine to drive to work on Tuesday morning, one of the three books still remains unopened.
Many of us are looking in the mirror and realising that we never did get around to learning that language, writing that manuscript, or becoming a virtuoso saxophone player, and it is easy therefore to follow a certain line of logic:
I had always told myself that if only I had the time, I would do X.
Lockdown gave me the time and yet I still did not do X.
Therefore I have been lying to myself - I will never do X.
Plausibly, I could donate all these unread books to a local charity shop. You could abandon all plans of starting that rock band, or backpacking around Europe and being able to speak fluently to the locals. You can write off your dreams of being a writer. There have been several depressing conversations overheard about such things. People giving up because not pursuing their chosen dream during this expansive gift of hours of free time, to them, counted as evidence that they were kidding themselves and merely using lack of time as a useful excuse for their inaction. If I used the time to watch Tiger King and binge on Disney +, but my oil paints stayed in the drawer and my easel locked in the loft, clearly I am never going to be an artist.
But I would take issue with the second premise of the argument. I do not believe that lockdown gave me the time to do X at all, despite the appearance of many hours with “nothing to do”.
Lockdown time wasn’t “normal” time. In my own case, when I imagined reading those books, it was in a fictionalised state of free time - normal life paused; an endless vacation. Lockdown was not that. I, like so many other people, did not find myself stuck at home with nothing to do. Instead, I was frantically having to reimagine doing the job I have been used to doing for nearly a decade in a completely different, remote, way. Those of us who weren’t furloughed or fired, were spending our days confused about how to do simple things as we relearnt how to do everything digitally. Likewise, as a teacher, my students, even if they were spending hours sleeping or playing video games, were still expected during term-time to be producing work. So some of us were still “at work” throughout lockdown, even though we were “at home”, and it was work done in crisis mode - rethinking what used to be instinctual, problem-solving what used to be business-as-usual.
But even those who weren’t at work and were given the “gift” of all that free-time - how could they relax when in most cases they had just lost their jobs, or had to live with the uncertainty that they might lose it in future, or that their professions might never again return. This is not a carefree holiday in which to learn how to bake and try online yoga for the first time, this is a stressful, anxiety-ridden shock to the system, full of worry about how the bills will be paid and where the next meal might be coming from. Even Year 11 and Year 13 students, not expected to do school work and having had their exams cancelled, did not get to let their hair down and enjoy their freedoms - they fretted about how a final grade might be derived, and whether the sixth form or university they had planned on attending would still accept them now that all personal autonomy in proving their worth in a final exam had been taken away from them. Would there even be a university or college to go to? And were their parents going through financial worries because they had lost their job or been furloughed?
Which is not to say those of us still in work did not have similar anxieties. Some could see the writing on the wall - they had work now, but for how long? Or they were technically able to work from home, but with children to look after and multiple people wanting limited broadband access, to do so was an incredible feat of endurance and domestic compromise.
And then there is the elephant in the room - Covid 19 itself! Whatever the state of our economic worries, every single one of us were suddenly living a life shadowed by this potentially deadly disease. Might we get it? Might it kill us? And for some, it did. So many lives during this time were, and continue to be, touched by the death and suffering caused by the coronavirus. Loved ones got sick or died, family members were at risk daily in their role as essential key workers. Anxiety levels were high.
And not just anxiety about the virus itself, but about its consequences - those with other medical conditions who felt hospitals could not accommodate them, those who could not see friends and family for months, those who missed weddings and funerals, those unable to get food delivered to themselves. The consequences of having a lockdown gave everyone a wide range of things to be concerned or scared about. Is it any wonder then that for many of us we simply did not have the headspace or focus to try and learn that new language or play the guitar? Of course we found ourselves leaning into comfort viewing and comfort eating. Holding those close who we could still hold, enjoying the things which already made us happy instead of seeking the difficulties of doing something difficult and new.
Some of us did, of course, achieve great things during the lockdown. I am not saying it was impossible. I didn’t read all the books I wanted to, but I did read some. Personally, I think I achieved a lot of great stuff during lockdown. But what I am saying is that if you didn’t, and even for myself, for all the things I still feel disappointed I didn’t get around to doing, this does not mean you should simply give up because if you didn’t do it now you likely never will. That is a flawed argument. A more realistic version of the argument goes like this:
I had always told myself that if only I had the time, I would do X.
Lockdown gave me some time and yet I still did not do X.
Therefore it is clear the sort of time which lockdown gave me was not the right sort of time in which to do X.
When I get the right kind of free time, I will still do X.
Or, the equally acceptable:
I had always told myself that if only I had the time, I would do X.
Lockdown gave me the time and yet I still did not do X.
This is because I decided, actually, I have better things to do than X and no longer have the desire to do X.
Because that’s possible too. Not to reject your ability or intention to do X and assume you have therefore been lying to yourself about wanting to do it, but to reject it because, given time to reflect on doing it, you actually decided X wasn’t something you wanted to do.
However you spent your lockdown time, the key thing to remember is that self-care was likely a priority during this very strange and stressful period unlike any other time in your life before. If you survived lockdown feeling sane and feeling ok (and Covid-free) then you did ok, even if you didn’t discover a cure for cancer or finally write that poetry you always felt was inside you. And not achieving something during lockdown is no measure of your viability to achieve it the next time you have some proper free time, unstained by the threat of disease and devastation.
Author: DaN McKee
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