Minutes, hours, days, weeks

Tuesday 24th November, 2020

The other day someone emailed and mentioned that the days simply pass and one is almost unaware of it. Today when I sat to write a letter I could not recall the date nor the day. I had to look it up. My diary was empty. I have a bad memory but it seems that there is nothing to remember. It all becomes a sort of fuzz, maybe even a timelessness. I was equally horrified when I went to catch up on a television programme. I could not recall which episodes I had seen. Then worse was when on Episode 8 I realised I had seen it all before. Now, I could simply be getting very forgetful, mildly demented or it could be an effect of Covid shut down. I am not traveling much, not seeing many, not doing anything like Museum visits or film shows or shopping or working in my customary Charity Shops. Even the daylight seems to be playing games. At 9am this morning it was still dark and dark again by 3.30pm.

I recalled T.S.Eliot and his comment that we measure out our lives in coffee spoons.

I think we measure them in action. Thus we celebrate a birth day, a marriage, a promotion, the birth of a child and attendance at a funeral. We measure by our next meeting, our next examination, pay rise, new car, by a move to a new house or in to a Care Home. Time simply flows, the seasons come and go, we note it only when we use our measuring rods.

Now we have little by which to measure so it simply all amalgamates in to nothingness. I recall Abbot Chapman saying to such a comment ' and that is God, of course'.

Timelessness is where the Mystics go.

I recall when I was a school boy I was one evening in my House Master's study. There was a knock on the door and a contemporary came in. He was and still is a brilliant mathematician. He apologised for bothering the House Master but wanted him to know that he had got up at 5.15am to tackle a maths problem he had been given. It was now 8.30pm and he had just realised. He has been so concentrated on the problem that no time had registered. He had not registered bells or hunger, nothing.

I have not been quite so 'out of it' but I have had the experience of having to say 'where has the time gone?' Yes, I have been so absorbed in a friend, a scenery, a book that time has not registered. In a strange way this is happening with all this Covid inactivity and absence of the normality of old. It is rather wonderful. Equally wonderful has been the huge increase in my life of dreams. I have had vivid and powerful dreams and at times have woken to wonder what is real...now or in my dream.

" When one of us gets lost, is not here, he must be inside us.

There's no place like that anywhere in the world." Rumi.