It always takes me a few weeks of January to get out of the habit of writing the date using the previous year. This year, every time I make this mistake, I experience a visceral gut lurch: 2020?! Of course it’s not 2020. We are done with 2020.

And yet 2020 is not truly over. While we let out this collective sigh of relief that we made it to 2021, tangibly nothing has changed besides the numbers on our calendars and organisers. The same forces at play throughout 2020 continue to play out now.

I don’t say this to be nihilistic or defeatist. Rather, I raise this topic to invite reflection upon the ways in which cultural constructions of time affect our ability to process life adequately.

Today’s version of time was designed using an interval system in order to maximise labor productivity. While our time today has a tenuous connection to planetary rotation and the movement of the sun and moon, this construction of time is mostly distanced from nature, associated instead with technology like our phones and planners. Modern time structures and organises humans.

In an April 2020 episode of On the Media, Anthony F. Aveni, professor emeritus of astronomy, anthropology, and Native American studies at Colgate University, noted:

That’s the giant step into the abstraction of nature. It’s the taking away from nature, the flow of time. It doesn’t matter to me where the sun is and who cares where the moon is, my work day is being regulated by now what I have on my cell phone that I used to wear around my wrist and before that the bells that I used to listen to to tell me what the hour was.

But our lives were not always governed by this form of time. Indeed it’s not how time works for much of our planet! Other constructions of time require us to pay attention to our environment, to our bodies, and to the needs of oneself and one’s neighbours. We go to sleep when the sun sets; we harvest when the weather changes. These understandings of time do not rely on a fixed system of increments but rather see time as malleable and fluid. They require an active orientation to every present, particular moment.

The phrase “pandemic time” has cropped up to describe the paradoxical experience of time during COVID-19 — when time doesn’t seem to behave quite the way it has before. Pandemic time is experienced differently depending on one’s circumstances, but the emergence of this term to describe a shared temporal disorientation I think points to the failure of modern time to help us make sense of this season.

Season.

In response, I want to suggest that we distance ourselves from modernity’s years, months and days, and instead consider how the concept of “seasons”, taken broadly, might reorient our sense of time. Seasons ebb and flow; they do not have fixed borders. Some seasons we experience individually; others are experienced collectively. Seasons require us to look out the window or walk outside and observe how nature is behaving. How are we and both our human & non-human neighbors responding to meteorological changes? Seasons are a relational way of being in the world. Seasons encourage us to be present, but also allow us to reflect on transition–transition from and transition to. Some seasons are longer or shorter, but all seasons transition into something new.  And seasons are cyclical. They return as something old yet simultaneously unfamiliar.

There is no clean break between 2020 and 2021. I think we all inherently know that, but it can be psychologically comforting to envision starting afresh and renewed. But, unfortunately, we are not yet done with this current season of life, and I don’t think it is done with us. Thinking about 2020 as “behind” us can keep us from the difficult but rewarding work of remaining attentive and connected to where and when we are as families, communities, and as a planet. So next time you accidentally write 2020 in a date, maybe just leave it there as a reminder that our years do not define the times. 2020, in a sense, is still with us, and perhaps will always be.

Cover image courtesy of Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Hello! Yes, it has been quite awhile since I last posted, and I am suddenly back. I took the past few years off to focus on finishing my doctorate. I defended my dissertation thesis in August 2020 and then moved to the Netherlands to take a job at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. We just finished our first semester, so I’m starting to feel a bit more settled. I now own two bikes, have eaten many frites with mayonnaise, and have made it to A2 level in my Dutch classes. So, I figured it was about time to dust off the cobwebs and resurrect the old blog. Let’s see if I can keep it up…