It's a beautiful morning for a revelation about time. Bright sun shining, blue sky, brisk air after a frost. There's a little breeze coming off the ocean, and I can smell the water even though I'm up on the hill at Vancouver Island University. Passers-by grin at me as I stop to touch the crocuses and daffodils, and gaze up at the branches of the trees that are budding out.
I'm not in a hurry. I take time to smell and see and hear, even though I know that there will be a student waiting for me in the library in just a couple of minutes. And, in the midst of admiring these crocuses, I realize that time isn't what I thought it was, not at all.
For as long as I can remember, I have considered time as an obstacle. I've tried to bend time, to make it something more like what I thought I needed. No matter how much I tried to cram into a day, there was never enough time for everything. I wanted to wrestle time into submission, and as a result, I also became very judgmental about people who I thought were wasting time. It occurs to me now that my worry about, and struggle with, time is intrinsically linked to how much angst I feel (the Buddhists would call this suffering). If I want to let go of that angst, perhaps I need to internalize the idea that time is not actually what I've made it out to be.
This idea came to me today as I was looking at the crocuses and thinking about the student I was scheduled to meet with. Suddenly, I wondered if maybe I was wrong about time. The version of time I've been trying to negotiate with is purely pragmatic. It's imposed on our day to day lives so that we can have some measure of order and consistency, but its' meaning doesn't run any deeper than that. Perhaps one of the reasons that I've struggled to generate a feeling of significance in my life is because of this punitive notion of time that has governed my behavior.
What if time is not an obstacle? What if it's more like a current? I'm reminded of a summer outing I took with my family a couple of years ago, where we went swimming in Puntledge River. The current is moderate, so a strong swimmer will do okay but a weaker swimmer might struggle. When we were there, a kid who was swimming a little ways down from us started to call for help. He was still afloat, but starting to panic and thrash. If he had just relaxed and laid back, he would have been fine. I have felt like that kid for most of my life; mid-level panic, thrashing against a current that I have no control over, suspecting that things could probably be easier but not knowing how.
So maybe time is actually a current; you can relax into it or struggle against it. I wonder though, if it's truly a binary or if there's some kind of in-between option. Would it be possible to both float in the time-current and keep up with the realities of school, work, scheduled activities, and deadlines? There must be a way to maintain the peace I felt this morning while still remaining a functional adult. I suppose, like most things, it's not static; this balance likely looks a little different every day. To start with, I'll try to watch out for my unproductive engagement with time and instead just go with the flow.
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