High Five: The Paradox of Time

Watching your child grow up causes time to bend in a strange way. Being a parent is the only thing that can make five years seem like an eternity, yet it also passes in a flash. Only being a parent can create this contradiction. I'm thinking about the essence of time as my kid approaches this milestone. At five, she's in the beautiful process of becoming. She's no longer a completely helpless baby, but not yet the confident child who will navigate the world more and more on her own. It's an in-between phase, a doorway separating two distinct stages of being. 

The Greeks spoke of chronos and kairos - chronological time versus the right moment. Her five years can be traced in chronos: 1,825 days, tons of diapers, first steps, first words. But it's the kairos moments that cut through the daily haze: her first real belly laugh, the day she called the moon beautiful, the morning during a car drive she said she really loved Taylor Swift. Five is the age of infinite questions, where "why" is both a greeting and an approach to life.   

Through her perspective, I'm reminded that wonder is not only the beginning of wisdom - it is wisdom. She approaches each day as a scientist, explorer, doctor, and artist - experimenting with slime, flashlights, toy medical kits, solving puzzles, building blocks, drawing and painting and signing her name on the paper, cherishing every visit to the local library, going on picnics in the woods with her binoculars and being intrigued by deer, snakes, rabbits, and people we’d encounter, and one day saying that our small-breed dog, Harper, would somehow grow up to be a “big dog someday, and then we’ll train her to be a smart dog.”  

As she turns five, I'm struck by the realization that being a parent means constantly living in the present while being pulled in different directions. We work hard to prepare her for an uncertain future, but at the same time we cling desperately to each fleeting moment. Perhaps this is what brings the most profound reality of parenting: it makes us time travelers. In our minds, we simultaneously inhabit our own childhood memories, our children's present, and the adult versions of ourselves they will eventually become. 

Five years old is a full hand of fingers, a galaxy of memories, a lifetime of love, all compressed into 1,825 individual days, each a complete cosmos in and of itself. 

Pandemic Journal-III

Weathering Heights

The winter – minus any major snowstorm and bone-chilling temperatures – was a bust. This year, it lived just in anticipation. We foresaw it coming, but it never actually arrived, like Samuel Beckett’s Godot. De-icer salt, snow boots, snow shovels, ice scrapers and snow brushes for cars were sparingly used. The local tri-state areas (areas surrounding New York City and Philadelphia metropolitan areas) likely experienced one of the warmest January in a century, with snowfall ranging from meager to barely existent, especially around Philadelphia.

January 2022

In Washington, D.C., cherry trees in the Tidal Basin – much like daffodils and tulips in the front yard of my house – are confused by the climate change, blossoming much earlier than expected due to unusually warm winter. As temperatures hovered in the sixties in Fahrenheit one day and in the twenties and thirties the other day, the winter this year acted, in some ways, like a hormonal teenager. It will not do what it is supposed to do, and it surely has no idea what is going on despite there is a lot going on.

With wildfires, extreme heat, drought, atmospheric rivers flooding, windstorm and snowstorm all affecting the state within a span of a year, California needs a special mention while we talk about weather extremes and the impact of climate change and how it is rapidly accelerating and compounding. Being one of the most biologically diverse regions of the earth, California has the highest number of flora and fauna of all other states in the United States. Weather extremes and ensuing climate change will not only negatively impact plant and wildlife habitats but also the ability of the state's ecosystems to support wildlife, clean water, timber, fish and other goods and services essential for the well-being of the state’s residents.

Voorhees, NJ. Summer, 2022.

Scientists and government agencies globally have suggested that the Earth is warming mainly due to human activity. Fossil fuels’ consumption has resulted in increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which, as a result, blocks heat from escaping into space. We may already be too late in reversing the worst effects of climate change, but studies by NASA emphasize that some of the worst effects of climate change may still be avoided or at least curtailed by responding with a two-tier approach: 1) mitigation (decreasing the flow of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere) and 2) adaptation (adapt to and learning to live with the climate change).


Itsy Bitsy Spider

If you are into Camus, there is no way the nursery rhyme Itsy Bitsy Spider does not remind you of the French philosopher’s essay Myth of Sisyphus. My daughter grew up listening to the nursery song – along with dozens of other rhymes, thanks to the highly addictive Cocomelon TV show – for around three years after being born, and her occasional humming of the song makes me wonder if whoever wrote the song wrote it as a response to Camus’s commentary on Sisyphus.

“The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout.

Down came the rain, and washed the spider out.

Out came the sun, and dried up all the rain,

and the itsy bitsy spider went up the spout again.”




The spider’s adventure is a man’s journey, albeit Sisyphus’s. For Sisyphus, rolling the boulder for eternity, and for the spider crawling up the water spout, is a metaphor for our struggles – and the absurdity, in many ways – in our lives. Being the “wisest and most prudent of all mortals,” Sisyphus was also rebellious that led him to be condemned by the gods to an unending, hopeless, and futile task of rolling a large rock up a hill only to see it roll back down to the bottom of the hill after he reaches the top.

Camus concludes his essay, suggesting that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of this mountain full of night, alone forms a world. The struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Acknowledging and accepting our fate is the ultimate, absurd victory. For the spider, it is to see itself crawling up the water spout and being washed out by the rain over and over again. For Sisyphus, it is to relentlessly roll the boulder uphill only to see it later roll down and still concluding that everything is fine.

Baby Babble

 

Fall, 2022

Until a few weeks ago, many of her sentences used to start with “because.” “Because I want to watch my [TV] show.” “Because Karli is my best friend.” And “also” in a sentence will be “also too” to her, eg, “I love you also too,” “I want to go to Starbucks also too,” and “mommy is White. Daddy is Brown. I am Brown also too.”

Her new thing is joining a few sentences without a period, making them a funny, muddling mosaic of thoughts. “I don’t open the door when mommy and daddy don’t open the door to strangers I have to tell mommy and daddy there’s a stranger at the door.”

It is fascinating how kids – since the day they are born – are programmed to develop language and speech: from cooing, smile, laugh [and screams and cries, of course] and babbling to speaking their first word, putting a few words together, forming a sentence and later expressing their thoughts and feelings in relatively longer and complex conversations. The earliest five years are most crucial, while the language development continues well into adolescence.


Father's Day, 2022

Parenthood is uncharted territory, regardless of the parent’s age or the kid’s age. There are many questions, many answers, many styles of raising a child, many styles of not raising a child, many theories, many facts, many tittle-tattles. As an individual or as a couple or as a group raising a child, we gravitate toward ideas, values, and beliefs that resonate with who we are and what our fundamental beliefs about people and the society are.


COVID-19: The Way Ahead

There are a few known unknowns and a lot of unknown unknowns when it comes to knowing the origin of COVID-19 virus and how it remains a mystery four years into the pandemic. The questions and concerns linger about whether the virus originated in animals, or it was a result of a leak from a lab in China. Health analysts and experts say the exact origin of the virus may remain unknown for many years.

 

Philadelphia. Fall, 2022.

Conditions of the ongoing global crisis existed even before the COVID-19 pandemic began four years ago, but governments in many countries failed to safeguard their populations, while in many others, most notably in Asia, they were able to curtail the spread of the virus only by imposing draconian social restrictions. Virtually, in every nook and corner of the world, the pandemic altered or transformed routine life, instituting an epidemiological view of everyday lives.

With millions of people succumbing to COVID-19-linked illnesses, a swathe of issues unfolded during the pandemic and should be examined meticulously: quarantine urbanism, technological refusal to accept empirical evidence, conspiracy theories, anti-mask sentiment, troubling state of healthcare systems, and, importantly, a lack of government accountability and transparency, particularly in non-Western countries such as India and China. While deaths and infections from COVID-19 are still occurring every day, the worst is likely over.

So, where do we go from here? Should the new normal be the new old normal? Are we – as a global society – prepared for the next global crisis of similar or a bigger magnitude? With nations and societies being fragmented, can nations govern themselves differently [and more efficiently] – when the next crisis strikes – from how they did or have been doing during the COVID-19 pandemic?

 

Connolly Park, Voorhees. Summer, 2022.

In his book The Revenge of the Real, Benjamin Bratton, an American sociological, media, and design theorist, argues that “instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.”

A didactic attempt to see the whole pandemic in a positive light would be to accept that an individual, a society, or a nation grows stronger through failures. In the United States, where “American Individualism” has been a defining feature of public life for a couple of centuries, there is a need to not allow these revered individual rights and beliefs in self-reliance to become self-destructive selfishness. We can honor and celebrate personal liberty, and at the same time we can nurture a resilient community that promotes individual and community social, behavioral, and physical health to strengthen us to face challenges like a pandemic.
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Pandemic Journal-II

Stories bring us together in turbulent times. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact lives globally, every individual and every nation has its own narrative of how they endured. How China used its authoritarian power to control the virus. How older Europeans were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, with the majority of all deaths in Spain, for example, being those individuals aged 70 years and above. How hardships prompted by the pandemic forced thousands of women and transgender women into sex work in Mexico.     

In India, a series of draconian lockdowns imposed by the government at the beginning of the pandemic brought the rate of infection down, but only temporarily, and the cost of it was horrific on the country’s economy. With an almost entirely absent public health system there, the country descended into “COVID hell,” as hospitals ran out of oxygen cylinders for ill patients and dead bodies began piling up in morgues and crematoriums and often along river shores. Public health experts and international media estimate the number of COVID-19-related deaths during the pandemic in India could be around four-five million -- more than ten times the death toll of approximately 475,000 people reported by the Indian government.          

In Kenya, schools closed, and thousands of children went to work, many as prostitutes. As an investigation by Reuters reveals, COVID-19 unleashed “shadow pandemics” on girls in Africa. “With families unable to earn in lockdown, girls are married for a dowry or engage in transactional sex, exploited by neighbors, drivers or other locals – just to buy food.”  

Voorhees, NJ, winter 2020

In the United States, the death toll from COVID-19 has now soared above 800,000, which is more than half the population of Philadelphia, as well as the number of Americans who died of cancer in 2019. A continuing, wide-scale vaccination to counter the disease dramatically brought down infections and fatalities and helped the country to shed the virus gloom and at least enjoy a somewhat close-to-normal summer and fall this year.   

New variants of the virus continue to occur globally, with some spreading more easily than others, some being more severe than others and responding differently to treatments. Viruses, in some ways, are like us. They evolve over time, become stronger, and undergo various changes in their lives.  

The pandemic is far from being over yet. 

***

Orange day-lily, summer 2021

Psychologist Lawrence Kutner says toddlerhood is like a musical fugue in which “the themes of intellectual, physical, emotional, and social development intertwine.” The best thing that babies teach us is that the fundamentals of our lives are simple: laughter, cuddles, intimacy, learning, friendships, and spending time with a set of people who are nice to us. They are therapeutic and corrective at times, teaching us that they don’t care how fancy their birthday parties are going to be, how expensive the car we drive is, or even how expensive car seats or strollers we buy for them. 

Brimming with confidence, kids are eager to learn. As a parent, we seem to have learned a great deal about parenting since the child was born. But as confident as we become, thinking that we are really getting a hold of this parenting thing, something would happen every day to remind us that there is still a lot more to learn. How do you pacify a two-year-old baby throwing a tantrum and going boneless? How do you tell the baby to use gentle hands while petting the dogs and not throwing things on them because they are living beings and not animated, playful objects? How do you make her understand that putting her hand inside her friends’ mouth at the daycare [and getting bit] is not what she should be doing? How do you tell her how funny it is to demand to watch the same nursery rhymes and the same kids TV show every day for months?      

A positive consequence of the pandemic has been to allow families to spend more time together amid a slowdown in daily life (conversely, this has also led to a significant rise in divorce and break-up rates globally). My daughter and I created our own chores and rituals: taking the dogs to our house backyard, helping me feed the dogs, letting her help make myself espresso every morning, long drives over weekends, daily drive to her daycare, making her fruit smoothie and popsicles on occasions.          

Parenting is hard, very hard, but closely witnessing tremendous social, emotional, and intellectual changes that a toddler goes through after advancing from infancy is parenthood filled with transcendent moments.    

*** 

Keswick, VA, summer 2021 

Winding through Albemarle and Orange counties on Route 231 in Virginia this summer, when we finally managed to see and spend a few days with my wife’s grandparents in Keswick, was as much as a driving delight as the Pine Barrens, the largest Atlantic coastal pine barrens, close to the home in South Jersey. The drive to/through Keswick via Route 231, a two-lane country road, is one of the most scenic in America. As you drive, the scenic views alternate between enclosures of leafy green tree canopies and the sun-lit pastures of horse and sheep farms. I was reading in an article in the New York Times that very little has changed in the town since a century ago. Sitting in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a few miles east of Charlottesville, the region is soaked in early American history, with much of the areas having been the site of plantations in Colonial days.             

The areas around Chatsworth in Woodland Township of Burlington County in New Jersey are full of ghost towns housing ramshackle factories from industries no longer surviving. Nestling in the Pine Barrens, they are prime examples of a Garden State industry that is still thriving — cranberry farming. A drive on Route 563 offers one-of-a-kind views of red masses bobbing on flat bogs. In normal times, there is an annual cranberry festival, one of the best and most interesting festivals in the Mid Atlantic, every fall. With hundreds of vendors, festival foods, live entertainment, an antique car show, and tens of thousands of visitors, the event is sort of a tribute to the Pine Barrens and local culture. The festival remains canceled for the last two years due to the pandemic.   

Not by traveling to some foreign lands – as we had hoped we would do last year and this year, but we did build some memories during our road trips that we took, on occasions, to see our family members, as well as during weekends with the baby and the dogs.      

***

An article published in the Harvard Gazette earlier this year points to the ongoing pandemic pushing mental health to the breaking point, with the young adults and the children being the most impacted and the effects likely being long-lasting. Prior to the pandemic, one in five Americans experienced some sort of mental illness; the number is now two in five. Michelle Williams, the dean of Harvard Chan School, says, “it will be months, if not years before we are fully able to grasp the scope of the mental health issues born out of this pandemic. Long after we’ve gained control of the virus, the mental health repercussions will likely continue to reverberate.”

Harper and Lizzie-I, summer 2020

Pandemic fatigue is real. So real. The World Health Organization describes the fatigue as “demotivated and exhausted with the demands of life” during the pandemic. And it affects us in so many unique, different ways. And one of the worst impacts of it is to lose boundaries of things we do every day. The boundaries vanish as we switch between dozens of tabs on our computers and mobile phones, streaming TV shows and podcasts, shopping online, responding to work emails, and attending daily household chores. The average American in 2018 spent more than 200 hours commuting. However, during the pandemic, as more people are working from home, they have been working three hours more daily than they did before. 

In a feature article titled “Living With Depression and Anxiety During a Global Pandemic” in the 5280 – a city magazine based in Denver, Colorado – Geoff Van Dyke, the editorial director of the magazine and the writer of the article, aptly sums up the pandemic fatigue, emotional exhaustion and the stress and monotony of staying home:  

“The darkness comes at night, or in the morning, or sometimes the late afternoon, in that liminal time between daytime and nighttime. It doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care that I have work to finish or that I should wash the dishes stacked in the sink or that I need to check in on how my two boys’ distance-learning schoolwork is going. It doesn’t care that, after seven months of mostly staying at home, I have already been examining the uglier recesses of my psyche.”

*** 

It is unlikely that the world after the pandemic will return to the world we saw prior to the pandemic. Numerous trends, with far-reaching consequences, impacting individuals, societies, and countries, are already under way, and one of the most notables is how the health crisis has changed businesses across the globe. 

The disruption led by the pandemic has wiped billions of dollars off the auto industry’s profits. Indoor dining in restaurants will likely not return to normal levels for at least a few years. COVID-19 has rapidly accelerated the growth of digital healthcare. In the education sector, while remote/online learning boomed during the pandemic, it has also augmented existing challenges related to inequalities, inclusion, and drop-out rates.

Pro-Trump graffiti, Route 70, NJ. Presidential election, December 2020

There are geopolitical implications involved as well. Ian Bremmer, an American author and political scientist, says that Coronavirus has accelerated three of the key geopolitical trends that will shape our next world order: deglobalization, the inevitable growth of nationalism and “my nation first” politics, and China’s geopolitical rise.    

***     

In a New Yorker article titled “Has the Pandemic Transformed the Office Forever?” published earlier in 2021, the writer John Seabrook asks an existential question: “What’s an office for? Is it a place for newbies to learn from experienced colleagues? A way for bosses to oversee shirkers? A platform for collaboration? A source of friends and social life? A respite from the family? A reason to leave the house? It turns out that work, which is what the office was supposed to be for, is possible to do from somewhere else.”   

It took a few decades and a spate of quiet revolutions to change the way offices are used – stamping out hierarchies of cubicles and walls and building them into team-based, open-plan layouts. However, technological advancements in office communications that brought in digital tools, such as emails, cloud computing systems, virtual team meetings, and video conferencing, which co-existed with offices in normal times, found a way to reach their prime exactly when the pandemic began, making a worker’s presence in offices less essential. 

While it’s true that digital technology cannot be a substitute for human connection, it’s also true that since the beginning of the pandemic millions of Americans have moved out of major cities and will likely not go back to offices. While companies, managers, and workers continue to struggle to figure out and reimagine what post-COVID-19 offices will look like, it appears that the pandemic may have already quickened the demise of offices. 

***

Choices made by individuals, societies, and nations during major crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have the potential to shape the world for generations to come. What is critically important is us taking collective action to build societies and economies that bring inclusive and sustainable growth and prosperity for all.