Have been doing a lot of reflecting these past few weeks. Probably some association with the weather. The cold, grey and wet usually makes me turn inward. I often find that I take on the character of the weather and the landscapes that I am in.
At the same time all of this rain is nourishing the soil, the earth and creating the opportunity for growth in the weeks to come. Time for patience. Time to start planting the seeds for the intended days to come.
In my reflective moments I often ponder time. How much? How do I spend my time? What is time? Is my investment of this finite resource productive and useful, and by what standards do I measure all of this?
It was once expressed to me that there are three types of time.
When as a species we were more nomadic, hunter gatherer types, there was chaotic time. Things happened yet we did not know why. The animals would show up, or they wouldn’t. There would be a lunar eclipse, and the moon would disappear, and perhaps the world was ending. It was all a mystery, unpredictable and chaotic. Best to appreciate the here and now, as one could never be certain of what was next. I speculate.
With the end of hunting and gathering and a moving more into an agrarian way of being and living, the concept of cyclical time rose to more of a prominence. I would think that in the era of chaotic time there would have been an understanding of the seasons, though more as an awareness as to a pattern, perhaps.
With cyclical time as a species we came to have an insight of the predictability of the seasons. The Spring was a time of growth, planting and renewal. Summer was for a caring and nurturing for what had been planted in the spring. Fall was a time for harvest, and replenishing for the winter to come. Winter was dormancy on the surface, and time for going within. A time of reflection, and planning for the next cycle of seasons.
Now we live in the age of linear time, with the coming of the industrial revolution. Our lives are controlled by the clock. Twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, and eighty-six thousand and four hundred seconds in a twenty-four hour period. Weeks. Months. Years. Decades. What is all of this, and should we be appreciative or dismayed by this linear concept of time?
Now we are playing a new game. An artificial game of how do we spend our seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months years? Now there is pressure and also disassociation form the patterns of Nature.The seasons. The moon and the sun. The rhythm. We are now living by a human-made construct, that has no reality, other than we have given it so. We have created “Clock”.
We are no longer connected. We no longer dance to the rhythms and patterns of nature. We instead give away our power to a false construct of the mechanical for the illusion of control, and being in charge of our lives. When we perceive our lives as finite time, it creates an immense pressure to do. To do more, be more, produce more, consume more. We exchange our time as a commodity to be bartered for. We have created this perceived reality of F.O.M.O. The fear of missing out. There is only so much time. Pressure. Angst and often dismay. There is never enough time!
What if we chose once again to experience our lives as seasonal. That there is in fact no “God Clock”, in the sky controlling us. What if we dare to take back our power to passionately say that our lives are like the tides. There are ebbs and floods. There are highs and lows. That there are no seconds, no minutes. There is just now. This liminal space of what we have at this very instant. This very moment. This breath that is filling our lungs right now.
How many breaths. No one knows. Though what we do know is that life is not measured in seconds, minutes and hours. It is measured in how are we fully living this moment. Right now. Breathe.