Where Vs. When: Keeping Track Of Your Dreams Can Help You Maintain Your Balance In An Upside-Down WorldHow do we cope when there is no perception of hours, or days, or weeks- or when we come to the realization that half a year has just gone by?
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It's August 2020, and I can't help but wonder: how are wealreadyin this month of the year?
When they said time flies, I don't think anyone was referring to the warped clock that has blurred and blended all the days of this year so far.
If you're waking up some mornings unsure which day of the week it is without looking at a calendar, trust me; you're not alone. For all its efficiencies and conveniences, it's safe to say that the perks ofworking remotelythat we used to enjoy have waned to a certain degree, and they are now instead causing us to lose all sense of balance and time.
For me, and many I've spoken to, that hardest feeling in a work day in this surreal crisis has been the sense of being perpetually stuck in the same day, everyday, without being able to plan ahead.
So, how do we cope when there is no perception of hours, or days, or weeks- or when we come to the realization that half a year has just gone by?
How do we keep track of time in the structured, deadline-driven way that we've been programmed to do so far, when everything around us feels distorted?
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Now, no one has the right answers, but I've been finding some inspiration from the world of art in this matter. To be specific, a particular painting from 1931 calledThe Persistence of Memory, by one of my favorite artists, the inimitable Salvador Dalí.
The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA. Image viaMike Steele/Flickr.
Dalí has claimed that this artwork, often remembered as "the one with the melting clocks," was actually inspired simply by a wheel of cheese that had melted; however, scholars have interpreted it to be a rumination on how time doesn't really factor in a dream world.
Indeed, Dalí has been known to have said that time had no influence on him while he was painting perhaps an indication of how irrelevant the concept of time is when you're doing something that you love.
Keeping that idea in mind, perhaps the stock we need to take now is not of time, but rather of where we place our attention. As we rush and pressure ourselves tokeep track of hours and daysand weeks through the times we are living through right now, maybe what we really need to be doing is just tracking where we are going with the dreams we had made for ourselves.
After all, the Augusts come and go- dreams, as they say, are forever.
