THE CHAPTERS: life lessons

Chapter 7

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ
Time

Our lives are governed by time. We live by it and in it. And of course, we die in it. We believe time is ours to save and to lose. We can't buy time, but we talk about spending it. And timing, we believe, is everything.
We wear wristwatches-and synchronize them-to make sure we show up for the meet- ing, meal, movie, or other activity at the right time. That's good, it makes it easier for us to interact and get things done, it helps us com- municate and coordinate. But when we go further, insisting that the arbitrary designa- tion of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years is time itself, we forget that we all experience time differently because the value of time depends on individual per- ception.
Think of time as a rainbow. Agreeing to coordinate our lives according to a clock to ensure that we begin and end work at the same time, etc., lets us see one color of the "time rainbow" the same way. But we see all the other colors in our individual ways.
In time, everything changes. We change inside, we change outside, our looks change, and our inner selves change. Our lives con- tinually change, yet we usually do not like change. Even when we're prepared for it, we often resist it. In the meantime, the world changes around us. It doesn't keep time with us-the changes seem to come either too quickly or too slowly.
Change may be our constant companion, but we don't tend to think of it as our friend. Change scares us because we may not be able to control it. We much prefer the changes we have decided to make-they make sense to us. It's the changes that happen to us that make us uneasy, that make us feel as if life may be going in the wrong direction. But like it or not, change happens and, like most things in life, doesn't really happen to us-it
just happens.

To age gracefully is to experience fully each day and season. When we have truly lived our lives, we don't want to live them again. It's the life that was not lived that we regret.
How many years would we like to live? If we were given the chance to live to be two hundred years old, or to live forever, how many of us would take it? Thinking about this helps us to understand the meaning of our lifetimes. We don't want to live beyond our time: how empty it would feel to continue in a world where things have grown beyond our comprehension and we have lost everyone we love.
When we look at the night sky, we are liter- ally seeing the past. We see the sky not as it is tonight, but as it looked years ago, from a few to a million, for that's how long it takes the light from the closest of the distant stars to reach Earth.
We have much the same experience with other people. Think, for example, about the neighborhood troublemaker from when you were young. If you thought he was a problem back then, you will be cautions when you see him today because you will see him as he was, not as he is.
How many of us see our parents as who they are today? That's a pretty big task, given our strong early impression of our parents as all-wise giants. Just as strong are our memo- ries of them as the terrible meanies who wouldn't let us wear our hair a certain way, stay out all night, and ignore our homework. If you were to meet your friend's father today, your impression of him might be more real than your friend's because you wouldn't be bringing extra baggage into the present reality. On the other hand, you would bring your impressions about fathers in general. If your friend's father was a plumber, you would bring all your perceptions about plumbers; if he was elderly, you would super- impose your feelings about senior citizens; and so on. You would see the past in him, but in a different way from your friend.
We have similar reactions to all kinds of mundane events. Imagine a child being reared in a poor family. For him, the daily arrival of the mail is an unhappy time, for it brings notices from bill collectors that upset his parents terribly. Think of another child who loves the mail because it brings Dad's frequent bonus checks and invitations to friends' birthday parties. Now that the two children are grown-up, the first has a vaguely nervous reaction to the arrival of the mail, while the other waits for it with happy antici- pation. Their feelings have nothing to do with the content of their mail today; they see the mail in the past.
We tend not to know who others are today-and the same holds true for ourselves. We generally see ourselves as we were, or as we want to be, rather than as who we really are.
There is a wonderful freedom in knowing that who we were yesterday does not absolutely define who we are now. You need not be chained to your past. Many of us wake up every morning and shower, washing off yesterday's dirt, yet still carrying yesterday's emotional stuff. It doesn't have to be that way. We can become new and begin anew, we can greet the day fresh and clean-ifwe can focus our awareness on the present, ifwe can see life as it really is. When we're not living in the moment, we don't really see each other or ourselves. And if we're not liv- ing in the moment, we can't find happiness. We shouldn't shut the door on the past, but we do need to see it for what it was and move on. Hopefully, we'll move into the now, the present, the moment we actually live in.
Jack had the ability to always be in the present moment. A runner who had raced in several marathons, he always seemed to be fully present. When he walked into a room, he looked around as if it were brand-new, even if he had been there a thousand times before. When he greeted you and asked how you were, he was paying attention. When he talked with you, he really listened-he wasn't thinking about what he was having for lunch, his date that night, or how much memory he was going to add to his com- puter. Jack was always there, tangibly in the present, with you and for you.
Unfortunately, Jack came down with a type of lymphoma that was particularly cruel to him because it affected his legs, causing them to swell and to be the first part of his body to go. But his quality of being in the present moment became even more marked as he got sicker. When you visited Jack and asked him how he was, you could almost see him making a survey of his mind and body to see how he was doing. In the same way, when he asked how you were, he was still so in the moment you felt incredibly connected to him as he lis- tened to what was going on with you. He was an eloquent example of being fully present in life. Not only did he not get stuck in his distant past, but once he moved on to you, he was done with what he had just said about himself. He knew how to live in the moment and invited you to do the same. You couldn't give him pat answers to questions suqh as "How are you?" and "What's new?" He made you really want to look at yourself and respond fully. He never wanted to miss a moment, he didn't want to miss a thing. Jack was never in fall, still experiencing summer. He was never in winter, distracted by hopes of spring. He was fully present in every season of his life.
After meeting someone like Jack, you begin to understand how this moment can be robbed by your past and future. You have no idea what a better experience you would have if you let go of the past, at this moment, to focus on this moment, to fully experience it and really live your life. While talking to your spouse, fully engage in the conversation instead of thinking about the class you're going to teach tonight. Afterward, go prepare for your class. Y ou'll have a better experience with your spouse and will make a better pre- sentation in class. Take one moment at a time.
We have come to rely on our futures. Some live in the future, some dream about it, and some dread it. All these approaches keep us out of the moment. One man in his fifties, who had finally had to leave work because of illness, woke up in the middle of the night in a panic. He opened his appointment book only to see week after week after week of empty pages. His future seemed literally to be a blank. He said he knew in dealing with this illness that he would have to let go of the past. He knew he would also have to let go of the future, but not until he opened his appointment book so frantically that night did he see what letting go of the future looks like. He had to let go of the structure of time we live and get lost in. Through this loss, he began to learn who he was and about his rela- tionship with time. At first, he had to grapple with the reality that time, as he knew it, was beginning to break down. For example, when friends called to ask what time they should visit, he said any time was good, it didn't matter. Through this he began to get a sense that he is continuing even though time-and filling it as he used to-is breaking down. When he searched deeper, he realized that when time is no more, he will continue. "The more artificial time began to break down," he explained, "the more I realized I lived in time and will die in time. And I began to feel, innately, how I am eternal and will exist past time. I will continue. At our core, we are actually timeless."
The reality of time is that we can't be cer- tain about the past. We don't know if it really happened the way we think it did. And cer- tainly we don't know the future. In fact, we don't even know for sure if time is linear.
We think of the past as coming before and the future as lying ahead, but that assumes time lies on a straight-line continuum. Sci- entists have speculated that time is not lin- ear, that we are not locked into a rigid past-present-future pattern. In nonlinear time, the past, present, and future may all exist at the same time.
Does this possibility matter? Will our lives be changed if time is not linear, if we are simultaneously in the past, present, and future?
Stand- ing at the edge of life, you want to know how much time you have left, but you realize that you have never known. In looking at the lives and deaths of others we often say that people died before their time. We feel their lives were incomplete, but there are only two require- ments for a complete life: birth and death. In fact, we rarely pronounce a life complete unless the person lived to be ninety-five years old and had a great life. Otherwise, we pro- claim the death premature.
Beethoven was "only" fifty-seven when he died, yet his accomplishments were tremen- dous. Joan of Arc was not even twenty when her life was taken, yet she is remembered and venerated today. John F. Kennedy Jr. died with his wife and sister-in-law at age thirty- eight. He never held an elected office, yet he was more loved than many of our presidents. Were any of these lives incomplete? This question takes us back to the wristwatch con- cept of life, by which everything is measured and judged artificially. But we don't know what lessons others are supposed to learn, we don't know who they were supposed to be or how much time they were supposed to have.
As hard as it may be to accept, the reality is that we don't die before our time. When we die, it is our time.
Our challenge is to fully experience this moment-and it's a great challenge. To know that this instant contains all the possibilities for happiness and love and not lose these pos- sibilities in expectations of what the future should look like. In putting aside our sense of anticipation we can live in the sacred space of what is happening now.