Lost Time.

Don't be fooled - it's not Wednesday again and it never will be.

One of the most shocking things about the first years of the pandemic was the way it interrupted life’s regular patterns. Even those lucky enough not to have directly lost someone to the virus were still forced to. Daily life was interrupted.  Unexpected breaks. Disturbing.

Now that’s over some have rushed to return to the old routines of not smiling at strangers on the tube, whilst others cling to the new routine of apologising about the washing drying behind them on zoom. Routine can stifle joy but it is central to happiness. There is a hazy sense that if there is repetition, if we can trust that things will be as they were, or at least stay as they are, if our lives make some sort of pattern, then somehow all is well. This is comforting but untrue. Things are not as they were and in the most essential sense, they never have been.

The earth spins as it moves around the sun. This physical action gives us a repeating pattern of days, nights and seasons. Coincidentally this pattern plays out across time. But these things, time and rotation, they are not the same. As a measure of the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun, a year is useful. But years, seasons, months, weeks, days - these are not great measures of time because all these things are rotational, they repeat in precisely the way time does not. We will have another winter. We will have another June. Another monday. But we will never again have last monday. This moment just passing will not be the same as the one that matches it for rotational value seven spins later.

The disruption to this pattern, the pain of a monday unlike other mondays, of a year when everything was wrong, the pain you feel when grief consumes you and shows you how nothing will be the same again - this is not the aberration to the true pattern. The pattern is the delusion. The truth is that no day has ever been the same. As a filmmaker I know that time is better measured in frames, each one unique, than in sixty cycling Babylonian seconds each lying that you’ll see them again.

Time and rotation are parallel coincidences that can be made to tell us the story we want to hear.

We are a species with an over developed sensitivity towards pattern recognition. We deal badly with coincidence, we mistrust accident, we turn chance into luck. We connect the spaces between ideas and turn events into stories. It’s easy to see how early sapiens might have benefitted from this pattern sensitivity, this story sense. Far too easy.

Survival of the fittest is regularly misunderstood as survival of the most fit. The strongest, healthiest, sexiest, smartest, brightest and best, we are here today because we’re what life couldn’t beat. But like the idea that our lives are an endless cycle, there is great comfort in seeing how every aspect of our body and mind, our behaviours, even our shortcomings have been honed by evolution, perfected for our survival. Sexist, racist, tribal, blinkered, dangerous but surely purposeful.

But for Darwin, survival of the fittest meant only survival of the things that fit best into their environment. This does of course mean that attributes which start as accidents but which grant a benefit tend to persist, but attributes which start as accidents and don’t necessarily get too badly in the way, can also bumble along without slipping from the gene pool. Coincidence happens. Like the World Cup medal winner who barely came off the bench, not all the ways your body or mind behaves are necessarily so the best for your survival. Not for now nor neither for some ancestral you.

We are not ancient people perfected for some prehistoric world, now trapped in modernity.  Of course modern culture has outpaced our evolution, otherwise the internet would be significantly more than a pictorial guide to our genitals, but it is too easy to draw all our behaviours, good and bad, back to some supposed perfect adaptation for the herding of Mammoth, the gathering of berries, or finger painting in caves whilst off our tits on hallucinogens. As if evolution perfected us for lighting fires with sticks and then stopped working like God on a Sunday.

We are not an unchanged sapien, nor can we reach back fondly to some savage Eden where all our flaws made sense. Our racism, our hyper sensitivity to patterns, our inability to truly comprehend numbers bigger than four, these might never have been more than flaws not fatal enough to disappear. Evolution should not be mistaken for another comforting story of repeating patterns and normalcy.

This too is an attempt to normalise the nightmare of time which burns up behind us, leaving not even ash. That frightful freedom you felt after they died. The exhilarating awfulness of when you went out in the pandemic and the streets were empty yet full of bird song. The rawness of discontinuity. That is reality. A beach with no foot prints but those you are about to make.

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Thank you everyone who wrote in response to the piece about my parents. Should you wish to see some of the wilder titles from my Mum’s library feel free to follow me on Instagram @benjaminblaine.

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In the past two weeks I’ve learnt that the new Google building in Kings Cross is as long as the Shard is high and that pink Himalayan salt comes from a mine in Pakistan, is 800 million years old and has no proven health benefits.