This post is a part of The COVID-Chronicles series. This series is dedicated to giving voice to graduate student experiences and needs during the course of the pandemic. It is a space for graduate students to come together, to share, to listen, to reflect, to empathize, to lament, and to learn from one another. We hope that faculty and administrators will listen to and engage in dialogue with graduate students, and act in ways to help support the graduate student community.
So many conversations as of late have been about the effect of the current crisis on my ability to do philosophy. “Are you able to find a quiet place to work? Is your office equipment sufficient? Would you say you are supported by your supervisors?” the surveys ask. They are polite and professional as they try to quantify what is happening to me. “Please rank the following statements on a scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.” I am unable to work productively during this time. I am unable to sleep. I am drowning in fear, uncertainty, and boredom.
Oddly, no survey has asked what sort of effect this has had on my philosophical thought. I myself am beginning to wonder. I have had to shift from a life that was centred around doing to one which is centred around watching and waiting. Around silence and observation. It has been difficult even for someone who loves the quiet. For so long, I was immersed in the full-time chaos of graduate school: part-time research, part-time teaching, part-time work. In fact, the whole world around me seemed to move at the same, relentless pace. A pace at which you cannot pause for a moment – let alone a thought.
But these days, I step outside every morning to watch the sea. I check on the small plants that now inhabit my garden, where there once was nothing but dirt and decaying weeds. They grow, bit by infinitesimal bit, every day. I speak to my neighbours. I run, or walk, or I run-walk, back and forth across the same two-mile stretch of farm road, bearing witness to the life cycles of potatoes, barley, cows and sheep. I notice the colour of things. I notice time. The way it passes, the way it feels when it passes. The way it feels when it is empty.
At the risk of sounding like I have been on an extended holiday, I should be clear: this time has cost me. While I have been lucky to escape the demands of caregiving, or the sorrows of loss caused by death, there are also other kinds of loss, quieter and smaller but not insignificant, which, once gathered, can make life seem unbearable. Loss of a job, a healthy mind, or a social community, for example. And so, in trying to find some small light in the darkness, I am looking for hope in what I have lost, what I have gained. In this newfound empty time. I think it could be showing me what life before was missing, what life ahead might still yet hold, if only I could extract my brain from the constant bombardment of screens and information and noise, of competition and achievement. Contemplation, an essential component of philosophy, takes time. This is something, in my haste, I had forgotten.
Deryn Thomas
Deryn Thomas is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews, studying the concept of work and its role within social institutions. She is also interested in the social, political, and ethical questions that can be found at the intersection of work, technology, and education. She likes to run, bake, write, and sometimes try to grow things on a farm overlooking the sea in the Kingdom of Fife, in Scotland.
