I can’t pretend to understand what Einstein meant when he said that time was an illusion. In fact, I can’t pretend to understand much of what Einstein said. What I do know is that living during these Covid years has shifted how I experience time.

Pre-Covid, I worked hard to tame time into manageable chunks. I exported all my scheduling to the brain of my smartphone. The chirping alarm warned me to floss before a dental appointment, change the oil before my engine seized and to send payment to the Department of Motor Vehicles to avoid being fined for expired tags. That same chirp reminded me of work meetings, improv class, music rehearsals, book club and weddings–gatherings I rarely missed for any reason. By using my smartphone to prompt me through my days, I tricked myself into believing that I controlled the passing of time–an illusion for sure, but probably not the one Einstein was talking about.

Little by little, the Covid monster swallowed my normal life. For a time, face-to-face encounters with humans all but ended. I stopped entering events into my phone because there were none to enter. No more chirpy reminders prodded me through my day. Metaphorically speaking, if time was a kite and the string was my smart phone, I had let go of the string. My Time-Kite wafted into the great blue beyond.

Covid has wreaked havoc in our personal lives and has disrupted the world at large. This plague has caused great anguish: loss of life, loss of livelihood, loss of connection to the people we love. Yet, I’ve discovered some gifts in the rubble. I could claim that my life is slower now, but that wouldn’t be accurate. The truth is that my life has unfolded in ways I wouldn’t have imagined.

Binoculars hang by my back door. I grab them when I see a bird or a bear or a fox in the yard. Yesterday, I spotted a red-tailed hawk sitting on my fencepost. In the Before Time, I rarely noticed birds. When I did so, I could only identify sparrows and pigeons.

These days, I spend my evening hours attempting to paint non-cringeworthy portraits, approximations of unsuspecting friends and relatives. I lose track of time, soothing my soul by splashing vermillion, peacock blue, and Winsor yellow on heavy weight watercolor paper. I paint for the primal joy of it. My main goal is to create a piece that makes me happy. My secondary goal is to achieve a likeness that will not provoke a lawsuit from the subject/victim.

Later into the night, I play the blues on my electric guitar. When I feel sad, I linger on the blue notes, those evocative tones that exist between standard pitches. I attempt to bend sound into a wordless wail. Often, my dog, Sadie, accompanies me with long sighs and low moans. She’s a captive audience and is probably thinking, “Bless her heart. I wish she could play a wee bit better!”

Recently, I noticed almost every battery-operated clock in my house had run down. I stopped replacing the batteries soon after I had acquired my smart phone. The truth is I ditched those clocks because they could not compete with my smartphone which gave me minute-to-minute notice of what I needed to do and where I needed to be.

This past week, I replaced the batteries in all the clocks. The only non-functioning clock in the house hangs in our dining room. It’s a big wooden beauty that used to mark time in my grandfather’s barber shop. I’d stopped winding it years ago, annoyed by its loud and insistent tick, tick, tock. I plan to get the old timekeeper going again. I believe I’ll find comfort in the cadence of time slowly and steadily moving forward, even if it is only an illusion.