Don’t we all
feel this way most days? With the endless demands of daily life, it's so easy to lose spontaneity, creative drive and passion. Our days are broken down into units of
time.
I first noticed this years ago
when we went to Brazil. One of the
benefits of traveling is, of course, getting out of our routine. But going to Brazil had an especially
dramatic effect on me because they relate to time so differently than us. Although Brazilians are becoming more and
more “North American-ized,” I could still feel that there's a
different relationship to time there.
Time seemed
more like a guideline than a master. Saying
we’ll meet at 2:00 really means we’ll meet between 2:00 and 4:00. I don’t know how they manage it, but it seems
to work pretty well. There's a flow in
the moment. Schedule decisions (outside
of work mostly, but still within the work ethic as well), are made more by what
is happening presently and not by what the clock says we should do or where we
should be.
I know this
all sounds pretty unrealistic and certainly unpractical. However, it made me view my life
differently. I saw that my life had
become units of time, especially with my kids: wake up time, breakfast time, get
ready for school time, snack time, dinner time, bath time, bedtime. Whew. Done.
It’s as though I valued my day (and myself and others) based on how well
I stayed on schedule (stretch the word “schedule” to mean all the to-dos of
life).
When I
stepped outside of my schedule in Brazil, I was able to see how much I was
missing: the look on my daughter’s face as I sat across from her at breakfast,
the fun of playing with the hamster before bed, the timelessness of pushing
them on the swings over and over…
Ok, now this
all sounds like mindfulness practice.
But there’s something more that I want to get to here. Time has become our master. It’s a great management tool, but we've let
it suck the life out of us. For me, I
think it literally did.
We can only
maintain this for so long. Eventually it
becomes an unsustainable way to live. It
hit me the hardest when I was running an import company several years
later. My body let me know that the fuel
of “driven by time” (aka lists, tasks and to do’s) was tapped. My adrenals (get-up-and-go juice) literally
said, “enough.”
So what’s
our real get-up-and-go juice? I believe
it is essence – life force – the invisible energy that is keeping my heart
beating right now, the infinite intelligence that is behind everything from babies
being born to planets not crashing into one another.
My adrenals
feel like a receptor for that energy.
However, when my consciousness is stuck in units of time, it’s like I’m
living in a “closed-circuit of energy.”
It’s limited and not sustainable, it burns out. So my body gave me a great blessing through
the adrenal crash I went through. It was
telling me, “hook up to source and live from there.”
The “how” of
a request like that is where the fun begins.
