Empty
Time
“Often,
when we are inconvenienced, we are being asked to slow down.”
Mark
Nepo (The Book of Awakening)
I
listened to a TED talk yesterday on NPR. Maybe you heard it, too. It
was about fear. An astronaut spoke about travel to the space
station, and one of the startling things he related was the speed
at which they traveled. He said, “we watched a sunrise and sunset
every forty-five minutes.” I knew about the view, the incredibly
beautiful planet we live upon, but this speed was a revelation.
Watching days flashing by as you hurdle into space must be unnerving,
to say the least.
The
more I thought about it, however, I realized that we all do that to
some extent. Days come and days go; we start out on Monday, and in
the blink of an eye, the week is over. At least it feels that way to
me. Here we are in 2015, when it seems the turn of the century was
just last year. We move so fast, always rushing into the future,
hardly ever relishing the now.
Mark
Nepo suggests that we change our view of time lapses. That we view delays as invitations to savor the moment. When we're
laid over, or standing on line, or sitting in traffic, we use that
time to stop and appreciate what is all around us. Rather than being
annoyed by such everyday events, we take the example of nature, and
get rooted in the present. I heard just the other day that being
bored is the bedrock of creativity. Instead of grabbing our phones
and distracting ourselves, we might use stalled time to simply
imagine, to let our minds roam. Who knows what ideas might pop up if
we had time to 'be' rather than 'do.' And when we're stalled, we have that time!
As we're so fond of saying around here, “It's a blessing, y'all.”
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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