You are not only a ‘who,’ but also a ‘when’ and a ‘where.’ Each of us marks a place in space and time, and that place is moving. Math, our minds, and our imaginations allow for negative times and distances, but only positives exist in reality. Three steps forward and three steps back always total six, never zero.
What else can we learn about time, just from experiencing it?
We notice it has both continuousness and continuity. In our minds we can move backwards in time or leap forward into the future, but we can only live time in its moment-to-moment flow, whether we realize that is how we are experiencing it or not. Furthermore, past moments connect to the present which connects to the future. Each moment is influenced--though never controlled--by the moment before. We can only act, speak, think, remember, feel, and set intention now; we have no control over the person we were and our only power over the person we will become is in the choices we make now.
When answering the distress line, we were taught to focus on the immediacy of the situation: what is happening now, and what is the thing that needs to be done? What is the question that most needs asking? I started practicing this on the lines and eventually brought it into my day to day life. It was a valuable and helpful lesson. It was helpful whether I experience time as a line from past to future or an ever-unfolding nowness.. Helpful things, valuable can be helpful and valuable in many contexts. Sometimes it doesn‘t matter what‘s true, what‘s absolute, or what‘s relative. Sometimes helpful and valuable is enough.
What is valuable about understanding time and change? How does it help to “see each thing in this entire world as a moment of time”?
On one level, it doesn’t matter. The truth will stay true however we understand it or not. We can be kind, and we can be still, and we can find peace, whether or not we understand the workings of the universe. It’s okay to not understand and it’s also okay to be not all that interested in understanding.
It’s just fun.
I started taking Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It’s a form of martial arts that takes place primarily on the ground. Learning means discovering a new way of moving, of examining and developing a deeper relationship with gravity. Something I rarely think about and often take for granted takes on new, exciting, and undiscovered dimensions.
The geography of time and is the same. The geometry of change. We can be points in space, but we can also be free of points. Instead, time and change flows around us. I was there and then and ten minutes later I am transformed to here and now. Where will the next ten minutes take me?
I can never know. I can never predict with certainty the next ten minutes, ten seconds, ten years. And yet I can influence it. I set an intent to go from my basement to the library downtown--and here I am. I have exerted the only power I have over time and change and it has borne fruit.
I woke up this morning knowing my job will end this week. I am afraid of my employment future, and I want to control it. But I have no hold over the future. The way to deal with the fears of the future and the regrets of the past is to learn to deal with now, with immediacy. This isn’t because now is a different and better place than the past or the future. It’s because now contains the past and the future; the thing I call now is already fading behind me and something else is beginning to materialize.
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