Exploring time

It was a brisk afternoon that day in early May 2020 when I was walking along the canal that was flowing through three neighbourhoods in Berlin. It was my standard walk in these Corona times, ensuring that I reached the planned 10,000 steps. Nοῦς ὑγιής ἐν σώματι ὑγιεῖ– „a healthy mind in a healthy body” as the ancient Greeks would have proclaimed. Who was it again? Socrates? Platon? Somebody less known? It was a guy that is for sure! The ancient world did not leave much space for women to portray their wisdom. Or was this a myth? Slowly, a vague memory came to mind. I had read somewhere that the owner of this sentence was an Italian poet living around the 2^nd century AD. It was a prayer really, a wish for staying mentally and physically healthy. Somebody translated it into Greek, omitted the prayer part and a new proverb was born. It fitted nicely the wisdom of ancient Greeks, it could really have come out of Heraclitus’ mouth and so it was placed just there.

            Crossing from Kreuzberg neighbourhood into Neukölln my pace was steady but my thoughts were racing. They liked doing this, not giving me the chance to follow them through. I felt smarter like this, stronger. “I will cross the bridge when I get there” I heard myself thinking. But I never arrived to the bridge, never with my thoughts at least. I had enough energy to tweak, question and adjust them and as soon as they were getting overly uncomfortable, another thought would replace the initial one, starting the game anew. So I would jump from the comfortable conclusion that the effects of the virus would only be positive ones to the new resilience tactics it forced people to come up with and to the various conspiracy theories and why they were not to be trusted. In between the racing thoughts I would take a break to think what there was for dinner or if I ever was to dance tango again. Were the human rights really challenged and if so was this a good or a bad thing? Perhaps we just needed new values. Was the nature of online dating intensifying during Corona? Should I not become a vegetarian after all…? It was a tiring game of serious topics mingled with trivialities, all based on a common denominator: human beings and their evolution.

            Something was different that day in May. Something urged me to stick to the thoughts, to understand and follow them through, at least one of them, at least one at a time! It may have been just the brisk air of that day but somehow I feel today it was rather my exhaustion of the unknown. I had just finished reading a book, called “Man’s search for meaning” by Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, who had been a Holocaust survivor. I have no idea where he found the strength but when he was freed and after he had regained some strength, he wrote this book, describing his time in the concentration camps from a psychological perspective. There are countless invaluable insights in this book but one sentence had resonated in particular with me. From all the hardships, the pain, the fear, one of the most intolerable ones during his time at the concentration camps, was not knowing when the ordeal would be over.  While duration in itself does not seem to be of any particular significance, knowing an end date, knowing for how long one has to endure, enjoy or even simply live through something, is of utmost importance.

            This thought I was to follow to its very end, I said to myself, or at least until I have completed the 10,000 steps! It was true that time had an incredible weight these days. I could recognise two main school of thoughts: Those proclaiming that Corona brought them heaps of additional time. Skipping the commuting to work, countless meetings and even being able to work in parallel on something else pretending the video function was just not available on their private PC, gave them at least 4 to 6 additional hours per day. They could invest that time to follow private endeavours, start eating healthy (aka cook for themselves), enjoy some more sleep or just the odd siesta. And then there were the others. Those who proclaimed precisely the opposite. They were actually missing 4 – 6 hours per day. Funnily enough the reasons were very similar not to say the same but this group stated that: Skipping commuting to work made them get up later; Not having their lunch at the canteen or nearby restaurant forced them to cook, a far more time consuming activity; Getting acquainted with all the new video, audio applications had robbed them the equivalent of one whole week. To every argument there was a counterargument. Myself, I was a big supporter of the latter group not being able to grasp how 24 little hours can be perceived so differently. Of course the analysis did not stop there. In fact that was just the easy part. The more complex one was about how the world would turn out to be, when all of this was over… A plethora of opinions existed out there and their simple categorisation into the optimistic and pessimistic ones would not do them justice. There were the positive thinkers, who always added a little “but” to their sentences or the negative ones, who glued “however” to their phrases. I always loved listening to the incurable dreamers arguing versus the hard core realists, both always uniting when it came to confront the conspiracists. Some people picked their theory out of pure fear, others out of indecisiveness and yet again others chose to change their opinion according to the day of the week or the people around them. The most annoying of all were the preachers and teachers and know-it-all, the ones who would try telling you what the correct behaviour, thought and action was. Still, the ones I feared the most were the ones without an opinion, the ones who chose to simply turn off their minds and just follow one of the groups, probably the most convenient to their circumstances…

            And then it suddenly dawned on me. All of them were in the right. At least partly, at least a little tiny bit. Yes, the world would change both in a good and in a bad way but is this not always the case? Some of us had been hit beyond imaginable pain, for some other of us it had been a pure string of luck and yet others were somewhere in-between. Does this sound all too familiar? It is because you have been encountering this phenomenon for years.  The only real change this time with Corona was that for the first time, at least as I recall it, this phenomenon was truly global and happening to all of us roughly at the same time. It does not distinguish between classes, wealth or borders, in many ways you could say it is a very democratic virus. Along, it brought countless theories on how to deal with it and I do not mean from a pure medical perspective. All the “why you should use this time for the better or for yourself or just for others” or all the “why you should actually ignore all that hype”.

            I was nearing my way home and was longing for a conclusion. For once I had promised to myself I would follow the thought through to its bitter end and see what happens. The obvious deduction was that any approach was a matter of perception. Optimists will see the good in it, they always do and pessimists the end of the world. But I was not looking for the obvious, I was not looking for the good effect it had on nature or whether this was just a drop in the ocean. I was looking to read destiny between the lines and find a way to influence it. With less than 5 minutes to reach home, I realised that time played a huge part in my theory. I was to stop waiting for this to be over, for things to go back to normal. There was no end date to sit out or to look forward to. We were already in the new reality, every day, every minute of it. And in it, in this new reality, I had a choice, an important choice and a very personal one.  I could imagine that if things had gone a different way, had taken another turn, it would have been worse and not for the better, as we usually like to believe. I could place all my faith into the universe and its knowing what it was doing and I had no one to prove me wrong. After all I was an incurable optimist.