It's a cold. Just a cold.

  I am thinking about how time has changed.  When I was working, it was sectioned into neatly defined, separately identified bits.  I knew the shape and size of 7:30 Tuesday morning, and where it fit into my day, my week, my life. Every minute interlocked with all the minutes surrounding it like distinct pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I recognized ten AM without looking at a clock. My body could feel when it was 3:15.  Every day was distinct and unique. And colors - blue Monday, gray Wednesday, Carnival-colored Friday at five, drowsy brown Sunday afternoons in winter, every day and time had it’s own distinct hue and texture.  Thursday was nothing like Wednesday, and Saturday was not just a different animal, but an entirely different species.

But since Covid, time has become amorphous; a pale beige, elastic blob like well-kneaded bread dough.  Morning stretches seamlessly into afternoon and I’m still in my bathrobe.  The days of the week are not Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.  Instead, they are Now, and Then.  And since the week now has only two days, (sort of,) the months have become shapeless, as well.  I think I am still up on what season it is, approximately.  There are clues.  People are walking around in shorts, and orphan zucchini are appearing on the front porch, so it must be summer. If I lived in Florida or southern California, I’d have no idea what time of the year it is, because Christmas decorations go up in October, and back to school isn’t happening.

I find I am enjoying this loose, elastic, slippery Time.  In the sixties there was a movement called Be Here Now which sought to bring us to enlightenment by  practicing mindful temporal awareness.  Today, I can Be Here Now, because now is all the time there is, and here is the only place I can get to.   And I am settling in with joy and comfort.  When one considers the metaphor of the round peg and the square hole, I am finding the me-shaped peg being accommodated by the pliant, stretchy edgeless whole of being.  The bread dough of time is resting and rising, while the creative yeast works. I wonder what sort of toast we will raise.