“Time has a way of slowing down and speeding up, depending on how it feels.”
-Author Carol Lynch Williams
I can tell you with great certainty that I have lost all concept of time since the coronavirus made landfall in the U.S. It’s almost ridiculous how far off my concept of time is when looking back at the events surrounding the outbreak.
For instance, the decision to close Ohio’s public schools was announced just 8 days ago. Roughly at that same time the NBA and NHL postponed their seasons and the NCAA canceled all spring sports and opted to call off of the 2020 men’s basketball tournament known as March Madness.
That all happened over the course of 24 hours.
Over that weekend, as people bemoaned the inconvenient lack of sports on television and debated the need to close schools, the ban on restaurants and bars was dropped. At that point the term precaution was replaced with restriction in the public vocabulary.
That was just last weekend.
I made a statement in the newsroom earlier this week about the NCAA canceling spring sports a couple of weeks ago and was reminded (at that time) it had been less than a week since that decision was made.
I also find that I am losing track of the order the events occurred in, forgetting that in-person classes in Ohio’s colleges were stopped a full three days before the decision on K-12.
Does anyone even remember when the decision was made to all-but cancel the Arnold Classic in Columbus? It was March 3. I’ll bet many forgot that even happened.
Time has truly slowed to a crawl and become a blur at the same time.
As decisions, once unfathomable, impact all corners of everyday life the clocks seem to tick in slow motion. People are urged to stay home where the weight of worry about their health, money and even food greets them. Traditional releases like seeing a movie, watching a ball game or traveling are on hold.
We just sit at home with sluggish clocks and lethargic calendars, thinking about things once thought unthinkable.
It’s the common perception that time speeds up as we get older. The reasoning behind this is that everyday life becomes very routine and we pay less attention to minor events.
For example, as an adult the things we truly look forward to might be weeks or months ahead, so the time in between is wished away as we focus on the future. As a child, we looked forward to things just hours in front of us, so every day held joyful undertakings. But adults plan big events months ahead and will go on auto-pilot in between. With only the recollection of spread out events to look back on, times seems to have flown by.
But in the last week, every day, and sometimes every hour, dropped a new challenge on all of our lives. And the scary part is, more upheaval is coming and we have no idea when we will truly be able to say life has returned to normal.
I have no doubt we will all look back at 2020 as the longest year of our lives.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune