WKND Musings: The eternal notion of time

In my previous avatar in Dubai, I had a wall clock in my living room. For a long time, I’d not check time on my phone upon waking up, but walk up to the clock, check out the time, and set the schedule for the day. Say it was 8am. I’d give myself an hour to have breakfast, a shower and a dress-up window to get ready to leave for work. On most days, I’d find it would be 10.30am — on the clock — by the time I was ready to leave. On occasion, I’d double-check the time on my phone, just to ensure the clock wasn’t faulty — but then, if the battery was running out, surely it would wind down its pace and not amp it up?

Where did all that time go?

I had no answers. It’s not that I was terribly slow at making myself an egg-and-toast brekkie, or that I’d take an hour to slap on makeup. So why was I lagging? It used to be a scenario that would set off a chain reaction: for instance, crisp winter days, when I toyed with the idea of walking half-a-kilometre to the metro station to catch a train, would see me frantically trying to flag a taxi because I had a meeting at MoE or Dubai Mall or some other place at 11am sharp.

Time, I told myself, had gone on a fishing expedition.

It came back to me last weekend, when I was talking to my father, and we were discussing (no prizes for guessing) social isolation, and he said something strange. For the past 15 months or so, he’s been on his own, the only “interaction” he has — from a distance — is with his masked household helps who pop in twice a day to cook and clean. But, he said, time has flown despite the “live alone”. A week feels like a day. “The other day”, he sent roast chicken to my brother’s place via an errand boy. Then he corrected himself. “That was actually more than a week ago, yet it feels like yesterday: where is all the time going? I’d have thought living in the shadow of such a challenging situation would make time crawl to a standstill… the opposite seems to have happened.”

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com