- I hope you are also keeping a journal.
- ENTRY EIGHT: Turning Within
Did your day begin “in this moment,” or were you preoccupied with past or future? I sometimes think of time as a sort of sticky web we are all caught in … and I’m not sure too many of us find peace within this context. Either we are resisting the future or clinging to the past … perhaps we are rushing to get to the future, never allowing “this moment” to rise to the top in our awareness.
But since there is no escape from the confining currents of time, resistance truly is futile. So is clinging, or rushing, or stalling.
Yet when I turn within … forget about time … there is a welcome spaciousness. It has depth, and there’s a sense of knowing that time is simply a vehicle for human experience. The spaciousness actually seems to make time possible: like an invisible foundation.
So who am I … the person time seems to have created or the spaciousness that feels infinite?
Both seem real, don’t they? Time more so, perhaps, because it seems to control our very existence. But as I wrote my memoir these past few years–am editing it this summer–I realized that we don’t have to allow time to have such a great influence over our lives. If we are much like the lilies of summer–arriving, growing, declining–many things impact our daily lives.
Things we have no control over, including time. We won’t live longer just because we rushed to get to the next project, the next trip, the next “something.” And surely we won’t live longer because we let time dictate our priorities, values, and beliefs.
Maybe the sticky web of time is merely an illusion. Something we strain against for no reason at all.
If the spaciousness within is what’s real, then we exist outside the confines and limitations of the currents of time. As the expansive soul named Walt Whitman once said:
“From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines … gently,
but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.”
So I choose to turn within more frequently these days … to a place without limits and imaginary lines.
Discovering who we are isn’t about schedules and arbitrary time frames. But it is about seeing beyond the illusion. ~ dh
For your journals:
What is your real relationship to time?
How can you ease its grip on your life?
Thanks so much for being here. Journal entries post every other Friday morning (next entry: June 13). Hope you are keeping a journal; at the close of this series, we will definitely compare notes.
- If you missed the earlier posts in this series, click here: Turning Within.
- To browse SunnyRoomStudio guest posts: Studio Guests.
- Remember: If you haven’t looked within, you haven’t looked.
