Time Taking Its Time
Don't forget to value the truly valuable things in life.
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Tools:
by Friendly Bear
Few things govern our lives more than time. Sure, gravity is right up there, but only because I've eaten a few pizzas and double cheeseburgers too many.
Friction reminds me that it's also important, like the time I was trying to take a garbage can to the street after a bunch of snow and icy weather. I fell on the ice, broke some ribs, and ended up sliding down a hill. When I finally stopped against a fence, the garage can, which had followed me as I slid, added insult to injury by landing on top of me.
Then, not realizing that my ribs were broken not just bruised, I went off to work. That was not a fun day, though I'm sure friction and gravity had a good laugh.
Time is different than the rest of physics: it gives us reason to reflect. We often measure time in seconds, minutes, days, and years. But, on a personal level, time is measured by the events that are important or formative in our lives. Thus, time is expressed by the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, when we got married, or the day we accomplished a goal.
One of my mom's friends was adopted, and her family always celebrated her "Homecoming Day". That has always seemed like a wonderful way to mark time.
For me, Christmas is always a time of reflection. My friends who are Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim, have commented to me that they have their times of reflection, too.
This Christmas, I didn't get a bunch of toys, or clothes, or candy, but I did have a safe and healthy year. A lot of people I know had coronavirus this year. Only one of them has had a prolonged illness, which has placed him in great danger. Everyone else came through after a few days to three weeks.
Some friends at a plumbing company had a rather humorous experience. Early in 2020, one of them got sick for a week and then was fine. The next week everyone else was sick for a week, which made them grumpy, but now they laugh about it.
This Christmas, I reflected on the fact that my business made it through 2020, while so many other businesses, and more importantly their people, had a bad year. I want their 2021 to be better.
Time waits for no one, but somehow time seems to slow down from Christmas to New Years. I know it doesn't really, and the perception is almost certainly like the end of a working day, a feeling that rest can finally be had. The nature of my profession requires me to work between Christmas and New Years, but for some reason it feels more relaxed, though I don't know why.
Years are like periods in games. Chess formally played has periods during which you must move, but among friends it's slower paced. Wrestling has three periods, usually a minute or a minute and a half long. When I wrestled the periods felt like they were 15 minutes long, such was the intensity.
Pets certainly perceives time differently than we do. We think of time as if it were a series of mile markers. We say things like, "Saturday I start my vacation." Instead, my dog values time spent with me, time in the park, time with his dog and people friends, time with the family.
Maybe the best Christmas present would be to start perceiving time, and what's really important, the same way as my dog.
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Tools:
What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
Time is relative? But what is time?
https://www.themindfulword.org/2016/timeless-awareness-time/
The following is from the link...not my words.... the truth
Two universal truths: There is no time outside of this moment, and there is nothing that exists outside of awareness. Everything is timeless awareness.
The nature of the present moment
Everything you experience, have experienced, or will experience by seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, thinking and feeling, both physically and emotionally, happens only in the present moment. Nothing happens or can happen outside of this moment. Everything that has occurred, is occurring, or will occur always happens in the now, and in that sense, time doesn't exist.
You can't live in or revisit the past, or move to the future. There's no future, and there's no past. There's only now. That's all there ever was and that's all there's ever going to be. That's all there is.
What you can do is use your memory to think about the past, or use your mind to imagine the future, but you can't go back or forward from this moment. Time does not, and cannot, exist beyond this very present moment-the moment that you are in and experiencing right now. You cannot get out of or go beyond this moment.
You don't even live life moment to moment because a moment, this moment, doesn't begin or end. It's a myth to think that you live moment to moment-it just seems that way. Where is the gap between moments? When does a moment begin and end? Can we measure a moment? There is only this unending moment.
The moment that you are in right now is infinite, with no beginning and no end. You don't have to try to be in the moment-this is futile, because it's where you already are. You can't get out of this moment. We are all alive in the moment, for now. There was no start, and there will be no finish. Your life started, and it will end, but the moment did not start, nor will it end.
Everything that ever happened, is happening now, and will happen occurs within this very moment, the same moment, the unending moment. The Big moment. It's always a "big" moment in our lives, because it's the same moment. The moment that's just unconditionally here, right now.
If you believe you're living moment to moment, you're using the concept of time to make sense of your experiences. It's OK to do that, but it just isn't true; that's not the way it is. The present moment is outside of time, and there's no time in the present moment. Time is a concept created by the mind in an attempt to understand the reality of no time. Time can only be measured within the unending moment. There's no time outside of the moment. The present moment has all the time in the world because it's immortal. Time is a mentally created concept that we use to help make sense of the continuous happening within timeless awareness.
Try to move away from the moment, and you will find that you can't escape it. When you notice and become aware of the present moment, it's always the same moment. It's not a new moment because the moment never left you; the moment was always here, waiting.
Nothing can exist outside of this moment. There is no outside, and we can't even say that we are inside the moment. There is no outside or inside; there is just this moment, always. Once you get that it is always this moment, time disappears, but you can still play along, as we need the concept of time to function in the world as it is now, for now.