what day is it today?

CUTHBERTSON, SANDERSON & ISABEL HENDERSON

ESSAY PRIZE

"An essayist does not sit down at a desk already knowing all the answers, because if he or she did, there would be

The essay is one of the most flexible and adaptable of all literary forms – an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human impulse to, as George Orwell notes, ‘see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity’. In 2021, GGS invites you to compose an essay that investigates the power of conversations in helping you generate a personal response to a broader political or historical event. The most compelling essay from each year group will be awarded the Cuthbertson, Sanderson and Isabel Henderson Prize.

2021 winners Manon Pirenc (8 KU) Millie Forwood (11 EM) Sophia Dallimore (12 HE)

what day is it

Though ostensibly ordinary, a question I now find myself asking more often than not. A person usually far too caught up in the ‘now’, my customary angsts surrounding time have strangely grown increasingly meaningless to me over the past two years. today?Citizens of this human world, we rely on the imposed pressure to adhere to timetables, itineraries, and meetings for our survival. The pressure to book ahead, to stay up to date, to not be late; it consumes us and relies on us to get with the program. But what exactly is the program? And why do I usually feel so guilty when

I lose track, when I fall behind? Or more importantly, why have I suddenly stopped worrying about it?

Today, I woke up and checked the date on my calendar, then checked again. Thursday the 12th of August 2021.

I was hit with the sudden realisation that eight months of this year’s twelve had already surpassed me, the equivalent of three of those months spent in lockdown.

As a little girl, the 17th of July, though it occurred like any other day on an annual basis, was a date that consistently took virtual years to arrive. The date marked my birthday, and a day for which the planning would start months before. This year, however, the usual lengthy count down was eliminated as July swung around at lighting speed, and to make matters worse, on the 13th day of the month, the Victorian government decided to commence state-wide lockdown number five, one that would supposedly last a minimum of three days. Supposedly, they said, however, as

I blew out the seventeen candles on my birthday cake four days later, I sat in the boarding house in my flannelette pyjamas, locked away. The sun on that winter’s day, pinned in a cloudless sky, rose and set without an audience, without anyone to sit out enjoy it, and rather than leisurely making its usually anticipated arrival, the 17th of July came and went like any other day.

When did time begin to speed up, passing us by in such an unseemly manner? Not only that, but how does it somehow seem to move at such a glacial pace at the same time? These questions lead me to Martin Beaver, a well-respected man and one of the few who can somewhat tolerate my often-senseless shower theorems usually regarding the likes of the universe, space, and the art of living itself (with the occasional debate concerning the ultimate recipe for a flawless slice of toast). It was with Martin Beaver that my journey through the depth of time began.

A tastefully humble soul who lives by the wind, and the type of guy to quietly protest for word peace while furtively walking his dogs, time spent in Beavis’ presence always seems to stop, yet somehow still pass by so incessantly. Discussions of childhood and growing up, boredom and sanity with Beavis made me addicted to the concept of time, but more so, thirsty for the answers to my questions.

A particular conversation with Beavis ended with the ironic line that ‘only time will tell.’ It was then that I began to research. Time, essentially, is the measure of change, and is a concept once famously pondered by philosopher Aristotle. It does not merely exist as a receptacle to place things into; it is dependent on what is shifting and remodelling, as well as what remains constant. Time is the observation of what has been and what is yet to come. The never-ending beginning and the indefinite end. The coronavirus became the centre of change in 2020, and with that, something happened to time along the way. Things are no longer measured in days, but counted in COVID-19 cases like the ticking hands on the face of a clock. We now cynically determine our futures and generate tomorrow’s plans not based on our schedules or the weather, but on a tally of death. In Corona-Time, there is little separation between a day and a week, a Monday and a weekend, morning and night, the present and the recent past, and while the pandemic's impact has been unevenly distributed across geography, race, and class, these time distortions seem surprisingly uniform. For millennia, philosophers have been mesmerised by time's elasticity, and for generations, it has been a source of inspiration for writers. More recently, it has piqued the interest of psychologists, who have devised tests and trials to better understand how we as people perceive time when we are hot or cold, tense or relaxed, monitoring the clock or focusing on something else. But what psychologists found most interesting was the discernment of time in cases of extreme boredom. Our perceptions of time can become unbearably slow when nothing changes. Boredom and loneliness become periods that can feel both terribly long and, in retrospect, almost insignificant, and getting a grip on time becomes difficult and illusive. Especially if you're confined at home day after day. It is famously said that “The brain likes novelty”. To get geeky about it, the sluggish lump of brain that lives inside our head squirts dopamine every time something striking or magical transpires, and although scientifical, dopamine is what puts these experiences on a timeline. The brain clocks these novelties, these out-of-the ordinary experiences and stashes them away as memories, recounting them later to estimate the passage of time. However, no novelty means no dopamine, and in turn, time becomes an ever-rolling valley of nothingness. In this era of quarantine and isolation, seclusion and loneliness, we are deprived of novelty, drained from originality; the WOW factor that our brains crave and find so sexy is removed, and in turn, we lose our sense of placement in the discourse of time. This led me to the interminable conclusion; it is not because we now exist in scenes of isolation that time has becomes extraneous, but it is the fact that we lack excitement, new joys and true sentimental passions in our lives that has me constantly asking the same million-dollar question: