Time, the one thing we surely did not need to stockpile, yet unlike the dwindling ingredients in my grocery cupboard rendering me dumbstruck come supper time, the minutes, hours and days are abundant. We are all starting to feel a little frazzled by the confines of our four walls and even our animals are starting to wonder just when they will be able to claim back the daylight hours of our home for themselves. The honeymoon phase of endlessly trailing us to the kitchen for titbits and sharing sunny slumber spots is wearing thin with the increase in tummy tickles and shrieking laughter from those youthful inmates trying to amuse themselves.
As we enter the second week of lockdown I am sure that we are all suffering from some lack of connectivity, whether it is the faces of our friends and family, or our colleagues or even the teacher at our children’s school. Those encounters, once trivial in their frequency now a distant shimmering oasis in this desert of human connectivity we find ourselves wandering in.
The very thing that shall save us, being the one thing we have evolved to depend on – being connected. I mused at the beginning of it all about how distance was the global savior of those who lost their lives to pandemics throughout history. Distance because exposure was limited by trade routes, and relatively easy to contain geographically.
The world we live in today is so very different, with its high speed internet access and satellite images that have made the world we live in that much smaller, that much more accessible. I am not going to knock the connectedness of our electronic age. It is the same creature that will help us to connect to our loved ones across continents and oceans during this time, help us to continue working so that we can ease the economic recession, help us share information and uplift others who are finding negativity in these dark spaces. It has a purpose and for that we should be grateful.
No, time was certainly not on my shopping list as I prepared for this lockdown, but you know what has crept onto it – data, connection to source. Those first few days spent anxiously watching the data donut dolefully drudge across my screen, then disappear as I lost connection. I needed to work you see, I needed to share information with people for work – it was important and I was letting the team down and the more anxious and angry I got the slower the donut drudged.
You see there is something you should know about me – I don’t get along well with electronics. I don’t wear a watch – they tend to lose time, or stop working altogether. I can literally feel the IT technicians cringe when they have to hear me out as I describe some weird thing my computer just did. I have an auto electrician on speed dial because my car’s radio, battery, lights….the list goes on, tends to act up regularly. I try to stay away from electronics but I also have a job to do.
So here’s what I have only just learnt.
When the connection was lost, I shut down the computer, switched off the wifi and went outside, I sat in the garden with my cats and talked to my children, I took out my paints and finished my artwork, I watered my seedlings. I acknowledged the connection with self, the connection with source and rewired.
It’s a funny thing, even though we have come so far, spread across continents, traversed oceans… evolved. There is one connection we have never lost, even though we lost sight of if, even if the donut was dwindling on its edge about to tip over, we never lost connection to source and time, even though it was not on my shopping list is the one thing I never want to be without again.
From the Pen of ... 