“Humans are amphibians – half spirit half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.” ~ C.S. Lewis
Time or our perception of how we determine time, has sped up. Have you noticed the seasons are coming and going much quicker? With random snow piles still on the ground, trees are producing buds that are swelling each day, and at first glance my thoughts were it’s too early, and than my brain informs me; it is the middle of March! Where does time go? As my awareness of everything grows the seasons seem to fly by. And so it seems this winter people barely were through complaining about it’s brutality and here we are with promises of spring all around. Even daylight savings time now comes early as we attempt to speed up the natural occurrence of the lengthening of our daylight speeding up the procession that leads us down the path to summer where our dreams seem to lie waiting for us to wake.
But is it time or we who have sped up, thus changing time or how we perceive time to be traveling? Many of us have a loose understanding that time as we measure it really does not exist the way we view it. What we refer to as time with our clocks, calendars and history records occurs only because of memory and remembering gives us a past and desires for the future but if we had zero memory, than we could not detect time and we would exist only in the moment. The popular saying “Be in the moment” is tough as we spend much of our day consumed by our past and planning and “building” the future. As our days become busier and our minds become more filled with communicating activity leading to continual activity, it becomes almost inescapable our obsession with time. There is no room for much of anything that is not up to speed. Maybe we are more in control of time and how we experience our lives than previously thought. Is it possible to break free and begin allowing ourselves to curve and loop time, rather than only seeing it as a linear line only moving forward?
When we begin to live this way it is like putting our foot down on the accelerator and what remains is real and necessary and what was pretended falls away. And yet still we find ourselves grieving the things we know no longer serve us, or others. We miss what has passed and what we have painted in our memories especially if they are memories of dreams never realized. This is when time slows down to a crawl.
How often is it we say there is not enough time in a day? All it takes is a bout of grief and time stands still and becomes the enemy. But these rest stops in life do not last. Truly we should learn to respect and even savor our grief in all of the many forms of loss throughout our lives. And if we could recognize the greater the grief – the greater the something was that was lost, including if what you realize you had lost was yourself. How lucky we are to have had something so great given us for however long it remained, or how lucky to find yourself if it was you that was lost?
As surely as the rain falls, the sun again shines. And once again it returns- that growing curiosity and that gentle nudging deep inside that we should not be wasting our time or energy. Your soul begins calling you to experience something new and activities you used to enjoy, you may no longer, they just don’t seem to interest you anymore, and you may find yourself becoming bored. There is a peculiar misplaced feeling about being bored – you feel like you should be doing something and yet you have no idea what you should be doing, it is like the waiting room for something new, but too often we are so uncomfortable in the void that always occurs just before a new experience and this infancy often sends us away in search of amusement and like junk food – we feed our consciousness with nonsense.
What if we began to recognize this pattern? All things are born especially ideas and all things do eventually come to fruition, if we allow it! However all growth nets change and all growth exacts a cost on other living things. This is an inescapable fact of life and the painful step we tend to medicate or numb. If you begin to allow it to unfold at some point the process can net sadness and confusion especially when you can’t seem to enjoy the things that you used to. This is okay! Stay with it and work through your sadness. Begin to become aware when you are living from a memory or fantasizing about the future and not the current true nature of time.
Our planet is changing and shifting, as are we. It must. The world can no longer accommodate our needs and those needs are destroying it and each other. Roadblocks are there to slow us down because the terrain is about to change. If something is in your way, it most likely is the way. Use kindness and discernment in all the choices you make especially now in these changing times.
~Cynthia
