Diary of an Isolate
14 Days in Quarantine
Day 4
Beloved, do not let this one thing escape your notice: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
Bible 2 Peter 3:2
I barely noticed the birds this morning. The dogs failed to show up as expected. There was one large green lizard hanging on the left wall, I noticed. It also disappeared immediately after.
Today was the last date for filing of financial statement for the year ending March 20. Work kept me busy until 4pm when I put my last signature, just before a friend called to remind me that the weekend has begun.
It is surprising that 4 days have passed, already, without a moment of remorse or boredom; or isolation; except a recurring urge to step outside and experience the beautiful weather and admire the sea view. The bedsheets are slightly untidy and pillows are lying all over the place. The writing desk is disorganised and water bottles scattered around. TV has not been switched on for last two days.
There is a slight nip in the air this evening. The met has predicted disturbed weather starting tomorrow. From the backyard, I look up the sky. A round milky moon appears to be floating in large bails of grey and white cotton clouds- pregnant with rain. The star next to the moon, is glowing so bright that even the clouds are unable to hide its shine.
Yes it is Friday today — a day devoted to drinking and eating — traditionally. Unfortunately alcohol is not allowed during the quarantine period. I am drinking coffee instead. It would anyway not be pleasurable to be drinking on your own.
Another friend called earlier to pep me. He suggested various ways I could keep myself in good spirits. Mostly by watching TV, he thought, time would quickly pass.
Can I “will” a certain speed of time? I thought. Could 14 days of isolation be packed in a single day?
Scientists are experimenting with brain alterations to induce such illusion of time. Renowned biotech scientist and thinker Rebecca Roache, who is working on how future technologies will change the punishment for crimes, has said drugs can fool the human brain, making time feel faster.
In a statement in 2019 Roache said, “You can imagine that a pill or liquid has been developed that makes criminals feel like they are serving a 1000-year sentence. “If the acceleration factor is one million, a thousand years of thought can take place within eight and a half hours.”
Isolation provides a rate opportunity to experience time in the past present and future simultaneously. If someone asked me to predict my future I could gladly do so with 99.999% accuracy — at least for the next 10 days more and perhaps for the next few yeas too.
The past is coded in my memory and the future in my imagination. There is no present indeed only a phase that connects future with the past. It has no material existence not even an illusion.
Alternatively, is there only a present and no past and future?
Or is past a mere unfolding of the future that has passed already unbeknown to us?
So is time itself something real and physical or is it just a mental construct that helps understand the various events happening around us — ageing, decay, oxidation and disintegration?
The MIT Physicist Max Tegmark whose book Life 3.0, I read last year has developed an interesting analogy to understand time.
Think of your life as a kind of movie captured on a “time” DVD. You know what is there on the DVD but you haven’t seen it yet. From the outside you can imagine ( and know) what is inside the movie but you maintain you cannot see the future although it is all there for you to see.
“There’s nothing about the DVD itself that is changing in any way, even though there’s all this drama unfolding in the movie. We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn’t exist, and that things are changing. But all I’m ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories”
Time, we all agree originated with the Big Bang and has continued to accelerate. But where did Big Bang originate from?
That question requires more than 14 days of self isolation. Or a world without time. A world without past present and future.
It is exactly the world we live in. It is also the world we refuse to recognise.
