4:45 pm

Katharine Russell

It’s 4:45pm again. That time when I’m not quite sure whether it’s a justifiable time to switch into evening mode and start thinking about dinner, tv, or maybe even a bath if I feel like treating myself. 

In the moment, I often find it an uncomfortable time, when I have a mini productivity panic about whether or not I’ve achieved my list for the day, or whether or not I should be going out for another walk or working some more, but despite this I think it’s a twilight pause that I will miss once lockdown is over.

In normal times, there’s no question that 4:45pm would ever count as evening. It is almost always still a work time, with real evening time pushed back to at least 7pm.  In fact, this is one of the things I may look back on with nostalgia after lockdown. It’s all too easy to lament what freedoms we do not currently have, and there are so many experiences that we feel the lack of so keenly right now. But I have been trying, throughout Lent, to try to anticipate what future me will miss about this period, and therefore to be fully present to those small moments which constellate these long lockdown days. Like the first, then second breakfast; calls from people on their daily walk; seeing the same joggers pass your house each morning; good recipe recommendations and then having time to cook them; re-watching films you’ve seen before and realising you’d misremembered; walking in the gloaming and seeing through brightly lit windows that most people are doing the same things you do. R.S. Thomas had it right when he noted that ‘Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush’.

I wonder what a God’s eye view of the way our prayers have changed would reveal. From desperation, to boredom, acute pangs of grief to weariness, grateful acceptance to grumpy impatience, to radio silence. I’ve often felt like I have more time to pray but less to pray about. And so as we are poised again, at a macro version of 4:45pm – between the struggle of the pandemic existence and the promise of a brighter time ahead – might we rest, and enjoy the in between, knowing it is right where we are meant to be, and in the future, we might miss it. For God is here with us in our ordinary, if we might only turn aside.