What Covid has taught us about Linear Time.

From the time of conception in the modern-day, our life is put on a timeline. Even in the hospital at our births, it’s 24 hours allotted labor time and then under the knife. It doesn’t really get any slower from there.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we all were given a small taste of what non-linear living looked like. We were thrown blindly into the non-doing. With nothing to rush awake and get ready for, hair appointments to book, workouts to squeeze in, coffee dates to schedule, or work hours to accommodate. When we are given time, maybe for the first time in our lives, to truly slow down and look within, who are we?

For those few weeks people took up gardening, they cooked and baked the slow way, they walked and connected with nature, read books, realized they had to quit jobs that are soul-sucking, and went after that creative project they’ve been putting off for years. The repercussions of this pandemic are of course multi-layered and devasting on many levels friends and I am in no way looking to sugarcoat over that. But what I am truly fascinated by, is for these brief moments in time, our species was reintroduced to cyclic living, and more so, did we in some ways become healthier because of it? 

The human nervous system was not built for linear time. This is why things like depression and anxiety run rampant in our society. We are expected to meet and live by a level of productivity that was developed and can only be carried out by machines. Human beings are animals, an animate part of nature. Like all other parts of the natural world, we are cyclic beings. Seasons, times for birth, death, doing, resting, seeding, harvesting. Our forced separation from this natural rhythm not only dissociated us from nature but also our own bodies. 

Seasonal depression? No, this is the season of rest and introspection. Themes that are not really encouraged by our maximum output social system. When we don’t allow our bodies to follow our basic human design, we get sick.  And of course, we do, could you imagine if the trees tried desperately to keep their leaves from falling or the turtles decided not to burrow because they had too much to do? 

Returning to cyclic living is a way to return to belonging and the right relationship. Perhaps this is the gift Covid-19 has given us. An opportunity to remember. But how can we possibly return to this way of being in our modern-day world? Unfortunately, in some ways we cannot, we must pay bills, take care of our children, and meet certain expectations to accomplish that. This realization comes with a whole layer of grief/homesickness that we all must move through, so give yourself space for that. However, there are small slow steps and boundaries we can make for ourselves to show up in a healthier more cyclic honoring way.