I've been having some thoughts about time. When I first learned about time as a kid, I didn't like it. I've never liked it. It was a way to be late and not get to do what I wanted to do--never enough time. I never could understand why my mom would say, “You can't go to your friend's house because you will only have an hour to play.” An hour! I could do so much in an hour. With a friend, it was forever. So was five minutes, for that matter! Adults made an hour sound short, but time with a friend was all the same to me--great!
Then, I remember one evening when I was fully immersed in solving some math problem and enjoying myself thoroughly in my little condoned escape from the world (homework), my dad came up and said, "You know, you won't always have all the time you want to finish your math." Although I know he was trying to help me learn to use time wisely and save me from disappointment, I was crushed. To me it was the final evidence that time was bad and wrong, but real. I've fought against it ever since. After that moment, there was never enough time.
I'm a very visual person, so basically, real time looked like a conveyor belt with time-line markings and all things and experiences on it coming from some invisible point and dropping off the end into an abyss of irretrievability--a moving line with unknowable infinity at each end. With the time-line as my "reality," I envisioned "now" as just standing at one point and watching life zip by--sometimes slower and sometimes faster. To keep anything, you had to have a really good memory or grab material things off of the moving time-line and keep them; once they were gone, they were gone. Since time remained linear and moving, "now" was pretty tiny, almost indistinguishable. I hated time. I wished everything would just stop.
Here's how this belief showed up in my life: I am a collection preservation professional, I document everything (even my thoughts, ahem), our house looks like a warehouse, I need to organize things to avoid losing them, I don't deal with loss well, the passing of time is very sad to me, as a kid I hated history class...
You can see how the Eastern idea of an infinite "now" might be nice, but completely incomprehensible in my time-line model. My "now" was an arbitrary, tiny point from which to view the time-line rolling by. It was so tiny that by the time I thought the word "now," it was gone. Nothing was concrete about "now" at all. It didn't even belong on the time-line since it didn't move. "Now" was out of place and time. Of course I could still get a picture of it in my imagination, but since "now" was not on the time-line and everything had to be, it really didn't make sense. So although I lived like my time-line was real, I never understood time. Never did, never would...or so I thought.
I’ve been noticing this thing about complaints lately: they all seem to communicate wishes. For example, “I can’t talk to people easily,” means “I wish I could.” So I applied it to my complaint about time: "I don't understand time," meant "I wish I did understand time." Seeing it that way started to remove the frustration from it, and suddenly I was able to simply see my complaint from another point of view. It had become a simple fact, "I don't understand time." I’ve been right all along! (Shifting complaints to wishes then reinterpreting them as facts is a great way to begin to un-stick a stuck belief.) A whole new world opened up when I got I was right, which supports my contention that all growth is through acceptance.
So now I'm right; I don't know what time is. That means it can be anything again, like it was before I decided what it "really" was as a kid based on my parents' comments. What if instead of a time-line, time really was "now"...a huge and infinite now...that you could access at any moment with all of your senses. What if you could just stop what you were doing or notice what you were doing and “be.” Surprise, it’s true! You always can, because it is always now!
The only reason we think one "now” on the time-line is different than another "now" is because by the virtue of our memory, we can tell one "now" from another. Voila, the the ability to see things as separate extends into time for humans, but not for rocks. They are a conglomerate of matter without memory, while we are a conglomerate of matter with memory. We can tell one moment from another and string thoughts and actions together in a linear fashion to change and even control what is in front of us "now" and "now" and "now." Rocks can't. While for us both, the whole experience of "now" is the same (being not doing), unlike rocks we get to "do" because of this rare thing that separates life from not-life--memory (from the simplest level of cellular memory, DNA, that allows reproduction, to the complex level of memory found in the human brain).
Because we have memory cells, we separate "nows," store them up and drop breadcrumbs in our brain to find our way back, and then project future "nows" based on stored ones. By separating and identifying "nows," we can sequence them and repeat them, learn from them and vary them, so that when we open our eyes after every blink, we find what appear to be new "nows" to experience. By remembering what came before and projecting what could come after, we can make physical differences in the environment in which we experience our “now.”
This way of looking at time, whatever time is, is all good. You can be in the "now" whenever you want as your natural default state because it's always here. Then you can take action in time and space in a linear fashion to change the next "now" for yourself. Memory is a gift of DNA, the ability to repeat and learn is a gift of memory, time-lines are a gift and a tool to use or set aside depending on your desires. To experience a moment fully, remove the time-line model and just “be;” to set an appointment, replace the time-line and begin to take steps in the "now" following the breadcrumb trails in your memory to get you there and then. With “now” as the default reality, time makes sense and is no longer wrong. Nice!
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