Experiments in Time

Two Mondays ago, I really felt the weight of the beginning the next work week. But like Atlas or Sisyphus, I accepted by burden and trudged forward. To my surprise, the day flew by, despite the tons upon my head. The next morning before classes, I met my friend and colleague, Kay, and I said to her, "It's already Tuesday!" As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I laughed and added, "That was a strange thing to say, wasn't it? Why would it 'already' be Tuesday? It's only the second day of the week!" I explained to her, as she smiled her always-benevolent smile, that I felt that as soon as we got through Tuesday, the week was felt as if it were over due to a strange half-day Wednesday we have at our school. She agreed. Then we decided to experiment. Throughout the week, we would check in and see if the week was really going as fast as we thought it was.

The week zoomed by.

On Friday after classes, we talked again. The week had gone by with incredible speed because we kept thinking and saying, "It's already..." This was the key. We weren't watching the pot boil, we were commenting on how it already had. I said, as I was leaving, "It's already summer!" We both laughed and joked about how we wished it were. Then, in my youthful impetuousness, I said, "It's already NEXT summer!" Kay, again with her angelic smile, said, "Not too fast. I'm old enough as it is." I laughed and walked out the door, thinking.

She was right. I was going too fast. It was like that stupid movie, Click, in which Adam Sandler's character moves ahead in his life and, in doing so, misses it. The movie was horrible, but the idea was correct, it seemed, from my real life application a similar concept. I walked back down to Kay's classroom (I have a habit of bothering my coworkers when they are trying to work), and explained all this to her. We talked and decided that the best course of action would be to take up an experiment in the opposite direction. Could we slow time as easily as we sped it? The next week we would try.

The week did creak by, but not in a bad way. Kay and I had decided the best way to keep things slow would be to enjoy and savor ever moment, to live in the now. We adopted a Zen mind in which the past was nothing more than what came before and the future was nothing but air in front of us. The NOW was the goal, the center, and the focus. It worked incredibly well. The week went by at a good pace...not too fast and, surprisingly, not too slow. By focusing on the now, it seemed that we were able to regulate time as we needed. The power of perception is an amazing thing.

I don't know if I will pay attention to time in the future as closely as I did last week. I don't know if I can handle the responsibility of working with time so closely. I feel almost as if I should go with the current of time--fast or slow--in any given situation instead of trying to work it. Perhaps that it just what we did l week because now, as I write, I realize that in the slow week, I didn't really pay all that much attention to the time, but rather just to the NOW. Maybe I can handle it, and I should. Maybe we all should.

It does seem to me, as I said here pondering the NOW, that the world would be a whole lot better if people weren't in such a hurry. If we could just enjoy this time to write, this time to eat a sandwich, this time to ___________. Perhaps I am in a place in my life now when/where I have stopped waiting for the next milestone, the next rite of passage, and I can just appreciate this place and how it looks, instead of trying to see over the horizon.

Wow. I think, that just now, I may have passed the biggest rite of passage of them all.