Wrestling with the groundhogs

"2020-05-18"

Week 10 of the pandemic they call it. More than ever before, I had to resort to checking the calendar on the phone and push my mind into recollection mode to find my bearing with respect to the days and agree with the 10 week assessment. This is the same me who had taken a two year hiatus doing nothing much than staying at home and trying to stay alive earlier in the decade. So I should know much more and be much better prepared than most of you for living through a lockdown. Frankly? Yes, I am! I don’t find these days particularly constrictive or unnatural. In fact, I even find it strangely liberating that I don’t have to make any plans or think about the immediate future. There is no guilt to staying in the slow lane these days!

But how do you keep track of the days, the weeks, even the months? What happened in March versus what happened in April? Every week, there is a monday, and soon there is a friday, oh and here is a monday again. Of course, we have a saturday and sunday. But which saturday was it that we went out for groceries? Was it this one or the previous one? Did we bake a cake last sunday, or was that four sundays ago? Is the passage of time still a thing or have we managed to bring it to a halt? It might as well have all melded into an all-encompassing chronic blob. All hail the C. Blob!

This brings me to wonder if this is the situation for a habitual stay-at-home hermit like me, how are those exuberant beings, otherwise proclaimed as extroverts, braving it out in their social isolations?

Would it be a stretch to wonder whether the lockdowns may end up altering the distribution of the intro-extra-version spectrum? Will these unprecedented days push the density of the distribution away from the extrovert end to something more in the middle? Will the world emerge from this period having gained more appreciation for staying at home, deliberating into the void and perhaps, be ready to give more credence to thought over action? Is it too wishful to wish for?

Of course, all those who are juggling working from home and keeping young kids engaged and doing all the additional housework and having to shower after every grocery trip all at the same time every single day would snort at this discussion and invite me to exchange places with them for a day or two. To them, I just say - “No, thank you” :P

PS - I opened the blogger account after more than a year to publish the above rant. While choosing labels, 'atmos' and 'general' made most sense. Curiosity made me check what was the previous post under 'atmos' - and it was this post - The-Year-Of-Groundhog-Days (its other label is 'general'). Aha! I guess I should find it reassuring that I still share some characteristics with my younger self!