Time. This human construct. From following nature cycles to getting enslaved to our beliefs about what it entitles.
We observed seasons and explained them by discovering the Earth was rotating around the Sun. We observed tides and women’s cycles and explain them by discovering the Moon was rotating around the Earth. Or the other way around, the chicken and the egg story.
The magnetism big objects in movement create makes movement possible.
Our human brain made us want and try to control the intangible. First act of greed in a way. We went on to try to divide years in 4 seasons, then made a wonky calendar that needs tweaking every 4 years because we are missing about 24h. 365 days approximately. Days, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds. The more knowledge we gained, the less time we found.
Controlling time created beliefs. We believed we had to fill the time that was entitled to us with material things, relationship, responsibilities. The more we tried to control time, the less we are in control of our own time. How is it that people seem to always be running out of or after it?
In Buddhist psychology, time doesn’t need us to be. We don’t need time to be either. We just are. We are in the present. Here and now, we are. We are no longer what has been and not yet what will be, we are just right here, right now. A being. A human entity.
There is something very poignant about the fact that most of us never live in the now. We imagine what the future will be. The imagination of what can/could/would be, traps us in a web of beliefs. We believe we should behave this way, think that way, do this in order to gain that. We are not living the present for what it is, but for what could happened because of it. We are in the desire of something that may or may not happen. We run out of time because we are in constant fear of feelings.
We divide feelings - healthy or unhealthy - as if feelings could be either of those. Fear, greed, desire, joy, depression, longing, love, grief, loss are just emotions, feelings. None of them is good or bad, they just are. Everyone of us will go through them a few times in their life.
Like time, we run away from our feelings. And we teach the next generation to avoid facing the ‘bad’ ones. Some people no longer know how to deal with frustration, loss or grief and don't know how to face those feelings when it hits them later in life. Without the tools to deal with feelings - whatever they might be - and be resilient, some of us develop anger, resentment and live in that zombie trance for all their life.
We run away. We try to get rid of emotions like we try to get rid of rubbish. Let’s throw it in the river, that will go away. By not facing our own literal rubbish, we accumulate it somewhere else and let someone else deal with it. Ecological disaster, economical disaster, political disaster, pandemic… There is a root to all those problem: humankind’s greed and selfishness. The illusion of power and control. On a more personal level, it's the same - we have the illusion that by pushing our feelings away, they will be dealt by someone else. No responsibility.
Sometimes we are trapped in the past. Memories, lived or not, unsaid history, from the global history of humankind to our more recent political and societal turmoil, we live for what has been. I have missed you. I am reliving this global or personal trauma over and over. I am still the wounded child, teenager, young adult. I live through my ancestors and what they brought to me. I see the world through the prism of my own ancestry, culture and education. I am not present because I respond to the beliefs attached to this education and culture I grew up in.
Practising mindfulness (consciously) daily for the past 10 months has brought me so many personal insights. It lifted me out of depression, and made me able to live with what is. It made it clear that I wanted to change some of the things that makes my present, our present as a specie. I accept what is in the here and now, accept that the future is unpredictable and that my actions and thoughts can be shaped by my past or expectations. I am curious about what all of this entails and feel much more connected to everyone and everything around me. By living every second as the here and now, I freed myself from running after a time that is not there yet.
Time isn’t. I am time.
