How can it possibly be December?

Where the hell did this year go??

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Most of you know I’m a planner. I spend some time every Sunday planning out the next week, using an arcane practice involving a workflow spreadsheet, a time-blocking app, and my bullet journal. (It is a procedure, okay?) I’m not going to apologize for being an uptight scheduler. However, I sat down yesterday evening to roughly plan out the next month (as is my habit) and received a terrible shock: It is DECEMBER.

How did that happen?

Where did this year go? I mean, I know that I never personally recovered from the time weirdness that set in during the most isolated phase of the pandemic, but this goes well beyond feeling like 2019 was a few months ago. This entire year has been a cyclic blur -- a whooshing sound of calendar pages falling away in time-lapse.

How did this year disappear? It could not merely have passed; it must surely be hiding. Is it lurking in the cabinet behind the couscous I meant to make in the summer? Did it fall behind the laundry hamper like a lost sock? Did the concept of the passage of time simply do a runner this year? Did it join the circus? Where did it go?

I understand that time appears to go faster as you age, and I’ve started to experience that -- but nothing like this stupendously fast year. Did I fail to experience enough novelty to slow down the repetitive nature of my life? Was it simply the weight of established routine crushing my sense of time into a diamond of disbelieving rapidity? It was the sheer number of sinks full of dirty dishes, wasn’t it? I did the dishes too many times this year. There’s nothing quite like the daily burden of endless dishes to make me understand that I’m just hanging out in the waiting room of death itself. I scrub a pan and feel my frail mortality slipping away bit by bit, then I load the dishwasher of existential dread -- only to do it all again the next day.

Did I shove aside FOMO so hard that I failed to YOLO? Did I experience too much stress -- or not enough? It is December, and this year has zoomed by like an 18-wheeler on the freeway hauling human experience to someone else’s big box store.

Will the rest of my life be a frenzy of nothingness where days melt from one to another with no boundaries? Is it really, truly December? ALREADY??

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