The most wonderful essay I’ve ever read about our love/hate relationship with the concept of time appears below. In the course of reading it, my brain was reoriented, and I was able to release (some of) my painful desire for control over the uncontrollable.
Thanks to Tim Ferriss for both introducing me to the poet David Whyte’s work, and for releasing a transcript of his podcast interview with him, which is where the following essay appears.
from Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
“Time“
Time is on our side. Time is not our enemy. Time is our greatest friend. If we can come to know time in its own intimate, unfolding way and not through the abstract measure we have made of it, time starts to grant a greater, more spacious, more elemental, and even eternal freedom to every mortal, seemingly time-bound human life. Time is not slipping through our fingers. Time is here forever. It is we who are slipping through the fingers of time. Memory, and the traces of memory grant me a sense of time passing and also enable me to learn. How I remember through time and how I put those memories and that learning into conversation with the future shapes my identity for good or for ill.
Time lies at the center of my identity. Time only seems to be something in which I participate involuntarily. But time needs me voluntarily to deepen my understanding of its multivalent nature and help to mediate its life fully in my world. Time needs me. Needs me to live through all its many appearances to give it life and amplitude. Time exists in a field of possibility which I influence and partly determine. I may constantly cry that I need more time, but actually time needs more of me. More of our spacious, uninterrupted, timeless time to live out and understand both its extraordinary depths and its incalculable far-off horizons.
Time teaches us that nothing at the surface is as it seems, but also that all the surface seemings of the world depend upon the all-embracing multi-level, presence of time. Time may take a linear form in my mind, but only because my senses are narrow, my mind given to defensive postures, to surfaces and unimaginative forms that restrict my understanding of the multi-dimensional, radiant nature of existence. Time not only invites me below all surfaces, but in all directions at once, including frighteningly, when time seemingly turns back towards me and looks me in the face.
Time may seem always to be flowing away from me, but in deeper states of attention, I and time are reciprocal partners. We create a multifaceted conversational reality together, not only through memory, but through direct experience. Seeing the multitudinous face of time itself and courageously holding its gaze is one of the great thresholds of religious transformation. When my sense of time breaks out of the linear, so does my identity in the deeper timeless states of love or newly being in love, time radiates out from the very place where I am standing, unbinding me from the well-fitted, previously time-bound manacles of my routine life. The sudden freedom felt when time is opened by the power of love always makes me click my heels.
The entrance into time is always the threshold where we are asked to loosen our grasp on our previous fearful understandings. Love is time unanchored and let to be fully itself, where the hours are rich and spacious with anticipation and the sudden sense that there is no immediate horizon to our possibilities. Without love, and the all-round attention, love pays to the world, time is where I feel most powerless. Without love, time is where I feel most powerless. Because time passes and I will die. So I hold on, of course, to a version of time mediated through control, exhausting my very power to live through the very force of my grip. Living fully and giving freedom to those who live with me often means letting go of the way I hold onto time, and all the ways I hold onto the people I love too strictly, too narrowly, and too unimaginatively, to my particular version of time.
Whatever the version of time we have arranged for ourselves, time always feels like a powerful gravity, a pull to our senses, always drawing us toward a clock, toward an appointment, toward a sense that something should be happening now, whether it is actually possible or not. Time is intimately connected with gravity. Astonishingly, physicists tell our disbelieving ears that everything gravitates toward places where time moves more slowly. And time seems to move more slowly the greater the mass to which it is near. The greater the gravity, the greater the slowing down of time. So that to our amazement, someone living on a mountaintop ages more quickly than their neighbors down in the valley. What physicists call mass, we could call presence. And as in a human life, presence is invitational. Presence invites other presences towards it. Presence slows time down and opens up possibilities of experiencing the timeless and the eternal. The depth, amplitude and invitational nature of my presence slows time for everyone around me. Timelessness is the foundation of all real charism and charisma. By creating a centered, timeless presence, I invite everyone unconsciously to make the choice to join me there. Or should they be afraid of what might happen in that slow, spacious territory of possibility, run a hundred miles in the opposite direction.
What is disturbing about time in my mortal human world is that my personal surface experience of it is irrevocable. The glass broken into a hundred shards cannot heal itself. The child I lost will never return to me. The regrets I have are things I can only heal in my imagination, in my imagination, or with others in my future who might benefit from the sincerity of my regret. This arrow of time exists only at the surface of things. When I die, the individual atoms and molecules of my body actually experience not time passing, but simply a change of state. A transition from an ordered world to one at another level, newly disordered, but also full of new potential. The meeting of time and the timeless is the place of my inevitable disappearance and transformation. Time tells me with some glee that we are all compost for many future lives and many future worlds.
Time never comes to an end. Even though my time will come to an end, time does not pass. Even though I will pass, time will carry on to eternity. Therefore, a proper relationship with the foundational nature of time is my own everyday doorway into the eternal. When I stop counting time as a way of controlling it, I stop my addiction to naming the hours and what should occur in those hours. That single pathway across the field suddenly branches to a hundred more no one has explored. That 30 minutes with my son or daughter fully spent lives for years as a precious, binding memory.
When we stop measuring change, as if we knew what measuring change actually meant, the human ability to measure time also stops. Which is why on a silent retreat or in a monastery, we make all the outer hours repeatable. So that day after day, nothing on the outside seems to change. We stop time on the outside so that we can concentrate on all the ways things change and grow on the inside. We dwell in the deepening, broadening, and maturing sense of presence we call the timeless. As our war against time quietens, we start to take joy in the increased acuity of the years. The entrancing aromas of rain on fresh leaves that we previously never gave ourselves the time to breathe. Time is left to itself to be itself and to grow what it needs to grow in every season of a human life. In a deeply rested state, as we loosen our grip on what we think is time, our sense of bodily tension falls away. Along with the falling away of a falsely measured self. And out of that, we begin to experience that joyful radiance we call timelessness, growing through every cell of our previously time-bound bodies.
Just like now, as I write these last lines in the quiet late-night hours in a hotel bar in Italy, listening to miracle hands moving softly over the keys of a perfectly tuned piano, memory meeting the moment in each note, and then memory and moment both disappearing and reappearing in the onward music, each note exquisitely timed, but part of an onward unstoppable flow. This moment in time, inherited from all previous times, rippling into the future for all time.
If you’d like to hear David himself read this essay, I got chu.
