After a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, a speaker uses a Twilight Zone metaphor about invisible workers building time to explore how ordinary people—neighbors, teachers, nurses—construct hope through small acts of care when the world feels like it's fallen apart.
It's been a heavy week in the US and here in Canada. It's hard for me sometimes to find something to hang on to that explains why everything feels so out of control. One of my favorite TV shows was The Twilight Zone. In the reboot in the '80s, there's this episode where time is not continuous. A couple wakes up and a crew of workers are in their house placing things, moving things around, just creating chaos. They find the foreman who explains that somehow they slipped into this parallel world where workers are actually building each minute of every day before we step into it.
Think of time as an infinite series of boxcars. Now, each boxcar is totally empty, and it's up to me and my crew to build something into that boxcar.
That's how the world comes together. This crew is always building it. Like, have you ever lost your keys? You go, you check the coffee table and they're not there, and then you go back 10 minutes later and suddenly they're there. Continuity error. The crew screwed up. At one point, the couple stumbles into an empty void. "Of course it's empty," the foreman explains. "No one comes down that alley in that minute, so we don't bother building it." I've been thinking about that episode since the school shooting here in Canada. Because when something like this happens, at least to me, it feels like the set collapsed. The minute we thought we were walking into a normal Canadian morning in a small northern town gets ripped apart. Props are scattered. Everything is off script. I think about that episode whenever I feel unmoored by events that I can't control. And maybe why it offers such a strange comfort is that I imagine that somewhere a crew is rebuilding the next minute. And they're careful. They make sure the world holds long enough for you and I to step into it. And they keep building our world even when the previous minute was chaos. Place like Tumbler Ridge, people know each other, you know? They share rinks and grocery aisles. When grief hits, it hits the whole town at once. So the next minute gets built by neighbors. Someone brings food. Someone drives a kid home. Someone just sits with a parent and says nothing at all. We are living through a ton of bad news now. Your phone delivers it in neat little rectangles, and if you're like me, after a while you might feel like the set crew's gone on strike and left us to wander around half-finished rooms. But they haven't. Teachers still show up. Nurses still take shifts. Politicians, this time at least, speak with restraint. Ordinary people still choose to steady the minute in front of them. We don't control the chaos, but we can build what the next minute looks like.
Ten times Canada helped the U.S. with its wildfires, instead of whining about the smoke. 
