Lessons from a 2nd Two Week Tokyo Quarantine

 



Thirteenth day of a 14 days solitary in a Tokyo hotel room to comply with Japan quarantine protocol.  My second 2 week quarantine in the last 4 months.  For a number of reasons this one feels harder.  Here is a time-lapse scene from my hotel window over a 24 hour period. Click twice on; A day in Quarantine  Try to break up day up with emails, telecons, skype conversations, reading, finishing my AI Machine Learning course, guitar, exercise videos, corresponding, movie watching, news surfing.  Many of the same activities I would do when home, yet life's realism fading.  No need to dress, groom or even prepare meals (food shows up in a bag on the door).  That combined with seeing the same world view out the big glass window everyday as though I am watching a TV makes it surreal and creates a flat affect.  Feels like ground hog's day.  What is real and what is just in my mind? 


  

A malaise and lethargy must be resisted.  What it highlights to me is that many of our daily activities, both necessary and recreational serve to distract us from the fundamental questions.  What's life about?  And what is real?  Analogous to contrasting Newtonian physics to the realities of time-space curvature described by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  The former is something we sense (gravity and traveling in what appears to be a straight line).  But in reality we are traveling through space in curvature fashion and time is distorted   It hurts my head.

The sun as I fly toward Japan in curvature fashion
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The final day did provide some memorable excitement.  Woke up in the night by a level 5 earthquake rocking and shaking my 29th story room. The violent swaying lasted almost 3 agonizing minutes. But the scary part was the groaning and popping the building made as it swayed. It was loud and had me hoping the structural engineers had done their homework. 

Location: Tokyo, Japan

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