This week’s thinking/journaling prompts: How does time feel right now? Does it feel different at all? How are you marking time, and making it, or passing it? In what ways are you hastening forward or waiting behind? (Bonus: Do you wish it were different, and if so, what would be available to you if things were different?)
It has been three days since I’ve left the apartment - or “flat” as I’m starting to get used to saying. I’ve fully embraced staying at home - replacing it with a much gentler, cosier winter hibernation - as if by choice, even when the reality is far from it.
I bought a series of fluffy fleece jackets from Uniqlo - “bear suits,” as K refers to them - that I cycle through every day, unthinking. They feel like I am trying to hug myself at all times, and luckily my new team doesn’t seem to mind too much that I’m always dressed like I’m about to go to sleep. The other day, I spent an hour down the rabbit hole of Etsy candles, before finally ordering one called “Winter” - “Citrus, Woods, & Patchouli, Handpoured in Kent,” it boasted. I liked that a small 30-hour light, poured in someone’s kitchen with a handprinted label could just maybe bring the entire woods to me. When it arrived in the mail, it came with a note from a Julia in purple ballpoint pen in friendly loopy handwriting, saying thanks. It prickles my eyes when burned, but it also smelled like Christmas is not over yet - and that is enough.
Friends ask me how London has been, how I’m getting along with the city, and I find myself unable to answer. “The view outside my window looks nice!” I joke. They smile and nod with that small frown that indicates they understand. How to know a place when I haven’t even really been outside?
There are some ways I’ve gotten to know this new place. I know the supermarket aisles really well. I know how to get around people there in a way that still respects social distancing. I’ve learned which tills to stand at so you don’t get boxed in by other shoppers; I’ve learned which M&S staff member will force you to hand sanitize on the way in and which ones are lax. I know how to be in and out in 15 minutes and get a whole week’s worth of groceries. In the woods near our flat, we know the trails that have less runners and more dogs. (The muddier ones.) I’m beginning to know the voice of each delivery person that comes to our door in a never ending stream of waiting for different packages. The creature comforts when I miss this moving target of “home"; the groceries box when we’re too afraid to go into the shops; the guy from the next street over whose address looks like ours who is chasing down his missing mail.
But even this limited knowledge, as thin and flimsy as it is, is a gift - one I find myself giving thanks to sometimes, quietly to the air in front of me, the moment before I fall asleep. “Imagine if,” someone put to me the other day, “imagine if you had stayed in Hong Kong, when would be the next time you and K will get to see each other in 2021, if you hadn’t moved in time?” I hug K a little tighter that night, worn down by all the ways I could have easily made a different choice, a more wrong one.
Lately, K and I have been slipping into wishful thinking - the kind I would typically shush up with the force of all my repressed-but-kicking superstitions, not wanting to jinx anything.
Lately, it’s been hard not to indulge.
The first places we would visit after “all of this” is over. The people we want to hug, that we’ll be able to bus, train, fly to, and be in the same space as. The new babies in our lives we wanted to meet.
“Do you remember movie theatres?” My heart takes an almost desperate leap, remembering all the antsy Friday nights where I impulsively took the minibus to solo midnight screenings at a small theatre, armed with a blanket and beer and chips I’d sneak in to the near-empty theatre, and bask in pure delight. Such unimaginable freedom.
Last night, K had a dream that we were in Spain again, “sipping a refreshing iced tea.” I dreamed we were at an airport terminal, bustling with people. “I also came 5th in a bike race,” he says. “I would have medaled, but I got lost.” We laugh.
In a catch up with my friends this morning, we marvelled at how “glacial” this week has felt. How surreal it feels to not be of the same timeline as our past selves. The language of distance, measurable and concrete, permeates our conversation. We feel removed and far away from “regular time” as if it’s a destination we’re waiting to return to.
In Peter Hessler’s The Buried, he writes about how ancient Egyptians did not perceive of time as linear, and events were “suspect” - “oddities, distractions; they interrupted the world’s natural order.” Instead, they saw time in two ways: neheh, the “time of cycle,” and djet, the “time of the gods. Neheh is repeating seasons, the annual flood, the path of the sun. “It repeats; it recurs; it renews.” Inspired by nature. Djet is “a state of completion and perfection” that is “finished but not past: it exists forever in the present.”
The ancient Egyptians believed that where we live is an impermanent island that will disappear, at some point, but they did not care to predict the future or parse the past. A scholar Hessler references writes that they “saw normal time as a circle that described an endlessly repeating present” - that it was easier to focus on today.
I pause, mid-page, thinking of living out all the rest of my “todays” before there’s suddenly “nothing,” again. It feels stifling - and a relief, at the same time. Never worrying again about surprises that throw us off centre, a past to yearn to return to.
Hessler writes that scholars believe the different landscapes of the river valley - neheh - and the “desert’s timelessness” - djet - is the reason for the Egyptians’ ability to see time in two distinctly different ways - “anywhere in Upper Egypt you can walk from eternity to now.”
I take my musings out for a walk, facing the sun, feeling my body adjust to the usual rhythm and weave of our path through the woods. Someday, in some distant desert, maybe I will miss this hibernating period of my life, the one I’m eager to leave. I’ll miss the rootedness of it, the reassuring cycle of every day the same, spent so closely in the company of someone I love, who loves me more than I know how to love, and the sharp clarity of what matters most to me in life.
Maybe someday I’ll learn how to walk to now.
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Margin Notes
Hello dear friend. Happy New Year! I’m one week late but if you’re like me, I’m hoping you are slowly coming back to email and daily flurries after some time spent “offline” - letting your mind rest, however you wish. I’ve been thinking of starting a newsletter just devoted to funny K sayings and dreams, like just now while I was proofreading, he asked me if I’ve “seen that Korean drama, ‘Parachuting Into You’ or something?” (I think he meant Crash Landing on You, which my mom and every other woman I love above 13 years who has seen it also loves.) Or while watching The Crown, “this looks like Gryffindor Common Room.” hehe!
Hope your first week of the year was spent in love and joy, and that you’re stepping into 2021 with your best foot forward!
Until next time, be well, sending you big hugs, Kerri
PS - I’m super excited to welcome my former Tiger Boss and constant life hero LB to my list of readers. A #milestone if there ever was one - welcome!
Photo by Marylou Fortier on Unsplash.
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Currents is a biweekly newsletter with essays and prompts to discover your joy and live a more meaningful life through contemplation. Subscribe to get these in your inbox, so you can forward to your favorite people, and leave a comment to let me know what’s on your mind. ❤️