Life in DIY mode

We are faced with a splendid opportunity: to be the architects of our own time, now that we have been given leave from the managers of our daily schedule. To be, as Pascal Bruckner has called it, an aristocracy of inner life. An aristocracy, I would say, of our internal clock. It is a rare opportunity for reappraisal and recalibration.

To many of us, it feels as though we’ve been taken captive and thrown in jail. But we are wrong to think we’ve POWs, when we are really handed a precious slice of freedom to use in the service of mental hygiene. What we do with it, as individuals and as a society, will show whether we are made of dust or rather stardust, galaxies of creativity and freedom, as many exclamations points against the entropy of the world beyond our doors and windows.

We fight boredom with the lightsabers of our imagination. We reject gloom with the cheerful glow of hope. We close our eyes and travel to more places than this world is prepared to allow us entry to. We pick up a book, a pen, a keyboard, a screen or a camera and we tailor new garbs for a world begging in rags. We have a chance to furnish our rooms with mirrors to better understand who we are and why our clocks don’t have to stop when all clocks in the world stand still. We look around and understand that space is not always needed for us to stay in motion, balanced and upright. And most of all, we dream.

A computer crashes when a line of code goes wrong. A bad play falls apart when lines are forgotten. We are neither computers nor bad works of fiction. We are suspended particles refracting the light into beautiful beams, always changing, always moving. Infinite, not confined.