No Day But Today: Time In the Age of COVID19

Rent is one of my all-time favorite musicals. My brain capacity is approximately evenly split between Rent songs, Hamilton lyrics and Customer Success rap singles. If you haven’t seen Rent before, it’s about urbanites (New Yorkers) fighting a virus with no cure (HIV/AIDS) while pondering the state of an unequal economy (the 1990s). So yeah, it still resonates a bit. In one of the most iconic refrains, the characters wrestle with the timeless nature of their situation:

There is no future

There is no past

I live this moment as my last

There's only us

There's only this

Forget regret

Or life is yours to miss

No other road

No other way?

No day but today.

Although HIV and COVID-19 are worlds apart, listening to the soundtrack last week (for the 10,000th time) gave me a moment to reflect on the times we are in—and in particular, on the time we are in. 

Stuck In a Moment

Let’s start out with the fact that I’m kind of obsessed with time. I love reading about time travel. I devour content about the physics of time. I’m riveted by philosophical debates about time. And I even kind of like Time by Hootie and the Blowfish. Admit it—you do too. 

But we all know that time is currently broken:

While Twitter jokes make for good fun, I’m actually serious.

The only word I can summon to describe our situation is we’re “stuck” in a moment, like that catchy U2 song that became popular after 9/11. Many of us are stuck at home, all dressed up in sweat pants and Crocs with no place to go. (Unless you’re the brave people keeping our healthcare and infrastructure systems going, in which case, thank you.) We are stuck in place as a society and economy, with no clear “V-shaped” path out. And most notably, we feel stuck in time, in an endless loop of terrifying news, Zoom calls and limitless tasks at home.

We’re so stuck in this present that we've stopped wondering what’s next. What are we doing in a week? Can we go on a trip soon? What should we do for our anniversary? When will shelter-in-place end? People don’t bother to ask questions about the future anymore because tomorrow got canceled. The future is either too ambiguous, or the answer is too depressing.

Last week, our 2nd-grader asked about her May birthday party. We told her it might be “shelter-in-place-themed.” She burst into a fountain of 7-year-old tears. (Actual footage.) We can’t reassure her with any confidence that her next birthday in 2021 will be back to “normal” or even a “new normal,” whatever that means. Normal might be canceled.

On a more serious note, the delayed weddings, deferred graduations, and destroyed Olympic and other athletic dreams demonstrate that stopping time comes at a big cost. Lives are being put on hold, at best, and are forever altered, at worst. And far too many of all age groups have paid the biggest price in going before their own times. For countless people, their entire future has been lost to something that we hadn’t heard of five months ago.

But it’s not just the future that’s in peril. Even the past feels a bit more suspect these days. Remember business trips? They are getting foggier in my mind. Did we fly on United Airlines? Intentionally? And I get that the popcorn was good but how were we going to movie theaters and missing out on Tiger King on Netflix? For gosh sakes, just a few months ago we even fist bumped each other, “blew it up” and then “brought it in” for a handshake and hug—what germ-spreading madness! Lots of crazy stuff happened in the B.C. (Before COVID) era.

Yet, here we are, stuck in the present. But let’s admit it. We kind of always wanted this, right? OK, none of us hoped for a global pandemic. 

But, we all secretly wished for a world where we could “pause” and enjoy each day. When the reality of shelter-in-place began, many of us washed our dishes while staring at plaques that told us “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” I longed to “take a break” that Alexander Hamilton never managed to find time for. We wanted to “get out of the rat race.” But we never imagined that the entire race itself could stop.

Groundhogs and Dogs Always Know Best

So where does that leave us? And more importantly, when does that leave us? I’m not sure.

Sometimes the answers can only be found in art. In unquestionably the greatest fictional work of all time about time, Bill Murray relives 24 hours* over and over again in the metaphysical canon Groundhog Day. As the character Phil aptly states, “Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today!” Preach, brother! (*Speaking of brothers, my annoying little brother reminds me that, because Phil wakes up at 6:00 AM each morning, Groundhog Day only takes place over 18 hours.)

Stopping time was a pretty nice idea for musicals, books, and movies. You could smell the roses. You would spend more time with those around you. You might even stage some really cool action scenes.

But I’m not sure it’s for us. We need that arrow of time, whether it exists or not. We need a background of mistakes to learn from. And we yearn to look forward to an unwritten story, even if it’s already complete in some eternal volume.

Dogs seem to handle it better. I watch our Labradoodle and sometimes feel jealous. I’m not sure he cares about the command we barked at him three minutes ago. And I know for sure he’s not worried about being late for a video meeting in an hour. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t noticed that we’re all home with him a lot more than normal. Oh, to be a puppy. The eternal sunshine of the spotless canine mind!

But we aren’t wired that way—unlike dogs. Like groundhogs and Bill Murray, we depend on time. Personally, after spending time in timelessness, I’m looking forward to returning to the fast moving river of the daily grind, rat race and all. But I think I’ll still take something away from this experience. Maybe I will pause a bit more intentionally, knowing that it will be brief. I’m sure I’ll be much better at handling weekend days where we do absolutely nothing. And I will always hear the joyful echoes of our childrens’ laughter while I’ve been on Zoom calls, long after they are back to school and I’m on a cross-country United flight. Pausing isn’t so bad, as long as we have the power to hit play again. Here’s to savoring today, fully knowing there will be another.