I don’t know when it started. But many years ago I began to have a kind of vision occasionally. It took the form of a story. A story about time. In the vision, one day, out of nowhere, the »coherence of time… its harmonies and rhythms… suddenly shattered. The vision was peculiar; like nothing I’d ever imagined.

I didn’t really expect it to come true, but I have a history of relationships with writing and creativity that sometimes turned out to be prophetic.

In the vision, it was like hitting an invisible wall. And there were all kinds of strange effects in the world. Some of them visual, some temporal, some impossible.

Not merely did each person and organism experience the onset and sequelae uniquely, at different times and in different ways… each »situation acquired unique aspects of this ‘broken time’.

As if we had previously lived in a shared continuum, that had been breaking down for decades… and then, suddenly, the whole thing shattered into fragments.

It happened. A number of my friends noticed. Some at around the same time, some later… some didn’t really notice. One of my friends remarked that ‘My sense of the future has disappeared.’ So did mine. As if a light within me that had always illuminated my path in time… disappeared. Almost overnight. Long before the Pandemic.

Other friends had their own experiences… some of them catastrophic… nearly all of them deeply troubling and confusing. I heard two mothers on the street remark: ‘Time has become all confused, I can’t tell what day it is or what time it is. My sleep is broken.’ Later, I heard a 7 year-old boy talking to his mother: ‘Last week happened 3 times. Over and over again. And mom, something is wrong with my dreams.”

There are forms of change in our shared context that we have never experienced and have neither words nor concepts for. I do not understand what is happening now. But the meaning of now is not what it once was. The meanings of the words we use to speak about time… no longer apply in the ways we grew used to.

People reported all kinds of effects. Vocabulary loss. Memory loss. Disorientation. Feelings of doom. Confusion in thought and mind. And a deep desire to leave ‘the boxes’ of our homes and machines. Many other things, too.

Now, I am a few years into this process. I do not understand it, but I am aware of it, and I can speak about it in meaningful ways. I do not believe we can put time back together. I think it may be broken for the foreseeable future. We have no experts on time. There is little or no science about it. Truly, we do not understand what it is, although I have had glimpses into its nature as a sort of fabric that unifies what might otherwise be understood as distinct organisms, places, moments, situations, emotions and… rhythms.

It’s broken now. I don’t think we can go back. We must, then, go forward. Into the mystery that now faces us. I saw it coming, but I never actually believed it could happen. I thought ‘it was just a story in my mind’. But the story became real. In the actual world… not merely the world of my imaginings.

Now we must learn to navigate in this storm. And, perhaps, there is something we can do to repair the problem… if not in the world at large… at least with and for each other, and the living planet. The clocks no longer mean what they used to mean. And it may have to do with the explosive propagation of machines. I strongly suspect this is so.

Now, we will learn to navigate in a kind of darkness that was previously unimaginable. Because, like fish in water, we didn’t realize that time was an environment… one that could be damaged… or even… destroyed.