Practice not-doing and everything will fall into place.
—LAO-TZU, Tao Te Ching
In our society, time has become one of our biggest stressors—and then some. With the advent of the digital age, the Internet, wireless devices, and social networking, we have entered an amazing world of 24/7 connectivity. It was supposed to make our lives much easier—and in so many ways it has. But we may also find that we have developed a dependency on the technology, and that it can become oppressive as well as convenient because the communications never stop coming. Plus everything is happening faster and faster, making it hard to keep up, even with the really important things. So the technology is both hard to live with at times (just think about email overload) and impossible to live without. And this is only the very beginning. The younger among us have never known the purely analog world and are thus, along with the rest of us, immersed in a novel and ever-changing world that never existed before, with all its promise and also potential costs, costs that may not even be noticeable if you never knew anything else.
In any event, there is no question that time is moving faster and faster as we juggle more and more communications. We may be in touch with everybody else in the world through our devices, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and the like, yet not so much in touch with ourselves. And we may be far too busy or absorbed even to notice.
Still, time has always been a huge mystery, and there is no sign that that will ever not be the case. At some stages of life, it may feel as if there is never enough time to do what we need to do. Often we don’t know where time has gone, the years pass by so fast. At other stages, time may weigh heavily upon us. The days and the hours can seem interminable. We don’t know what to do with all our time. Crazy as it may sound, I am suggesting that the antidote to time stress is intentional non-doing, and that non-doing is applicable whether you are suffering from not having “enough time” or suffering from having “too much time.” The challenge here is for you to put this proposition to the test in your own life, to see for yourself whether your relationship to time can be transformed through the practice of non-doing—in other words, though the cultivation of mindfulness.
If you feel completely overwhelmed by the pressures of time, you might wonder: how could it possibly help to take time away from everything you “have to do” in order to practice non-doing? And on the other hand, if you are feeling isolated and bored and have nothing but time on your hands, you might wonder how it could possibly help to fill this burden of unfilled time with “nothing.”
The answer is simple and not at all far-fetched: well-being, inner balance, and peacefulness exist outside time. If you commit yourself to spending some time each day in inner stillness, even if it is for two minutes, or five, or ten, for those moments you are stepping out of the flow of time altogether. The stillness and calm, the sense of well-being and wakeful presence that come from letting go of time transform your experience of time when you move back into it. Then, simply by bringing awareness to present-moment experience, it becomes possible to flow along with time during your day rather than constantly fighting against it or feeling driven by it.
The more you practice making some time in your day for non-doing, the more your whole day becomes non-doing; in other words, the more it is suffused with an awareness grounded in the present moment and therefore outside of time. Perhaps you have already experienced this if you have been practicing the sitting meditation or the body scan or the yoga. Perhaps you have observed that being aware takes no extra time, that awareness simply rounds out each moment, restores its fullness, breathes life into it, makes it embodied. So if you are pressed for time, being in the present gives you more time by giving you back the fullness of each moment that you already have. No matter what is happening, you can be centered in perceiving and accepting things as they are. Of course, you can also be aware of what still needs to be done in the future, without it causing you undue anxiety or loss of perspective. Then you can move to do it, with your doing coming out of your being, out of groundedness, out of integration, out of a moment of interior balance, of equanimity, of peace.
You can even bring this orientation to your electronic communications, whether it is texting, email, spending time on Facebook or Twitter, or sharing photos and videos—whatever your preferences. How? First by being in your body as you use your devices, and thus being in the present moment. Second, you can construct texts mindfully, with full awareness of what you are doing. If you are responding to tons of email, you can pace yourself so you are not feeling like you are playing Whac-A-Mole and running faster and faster to respond, even as you fall further and further “behind.” You are only falling behind in your own mind, especially if you lose touch with who is doing all the doing, namely, with who you are, and the whole domain of being. Otherwise, as you well know, you can click send before you even realize that you didn’t want to say what you said, or forgot the most important point. Also, you can become aware of the impulse to tweet, to share a moment or a thought, and how easily it can come between you and the experience you think you are having (and broadcasting to others) but aren’t really having because you are too busy advertising your location and impressions to take a moment to drop in on your experience and actually feel it, and let it develop unevaluated and unshared, at least for a moment. These are all ongoing challenges brought on by the speed-up of virtually everything, and the endless appetite and impulses for recording and sharing our experience even before we allow ourselves to have it, breathe with it, digest it, and assimilate it in our own heart and mind. These are all new occupational hazards of carrying wireless multi-purpose micro-supercomputers in our pockets and purses. We do this stuff just because we can. But do we ever stop and ask ourselves, even for one moment or one breath, what might be lost in this process of documenting and sharing so quickly?
Now that we have at least touched on what it feels like to never have enough time, and what we might do about that, let’s suppose that you find yourself in the exact opposite life situation, in which you don’t know what to do with all the time you have. Sad to say, this is too often the case as we get older and perhaps move into being more isolated and frailer, perhaps with some of our senses less acute than they used to be, putting us even more out of touch. Time can weigh on your hands. Perhaps you feel empty, disconnected from the world and from all the meaningful things being done in it. Perhaps you can’t go out, or hold down a job, or get out of bed for long, or even read much to “pass the time.” Perhaps you are alone, without friends and relatives, or far from them. Perhaps you don’t even understand the Internet and don’t want to. How could non-doing possibly help you? You are already not doing anything and it is driving you nuts!
Actually, you are probably doing a lot even though you are unaware of it. For one thing, you may be “doing” unhappiness, boredom, and anxiety. You are probably spending at least some time, and perhaps a great deal of time, dwelling in your thoughts and memories, reliving pleasant moments from the past or unhappy events. You may be “doing” anger at other people for things that happened long ago. You may be “doing” loneliness, resentment, self-pity, or hopelessness. These inner whirlpools of the mind can drain your energy. They can be exhausting and make the passage of time seem interminable. Loneliness is a risk factor in and of itself for both ill health and mortality. As we saw in the Carnegie Mellon study, training in MBSR can reduce loneliness, and seems to make a difference right down to the level of our genes and our cells. One way it may be doing this is by transforming our relationship to time.
Our subjective experience of time passing seems linked to the activity of thought in some way. We think about the past, we think about the future. Time is measured as the space between our thoughts, and in the never-ending stream of them. As we practice mindfully watching our thoughts come and go, we are cultivating an ability to dwell in the silence and stillness beyond the stream of thought itself, in a timeless present. Since the present is always here, now, it is already outside of time passing. T. S. Eliot put it this way at the very end of the first of Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton”:
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before, and after.
The whole of Four Quartets, his last and greatest poem, is about time, its beauty, its mystery, and its “indignities.”
Non-doing is a radical stance to adopt, even for one moment. It means letting go of our attachment to everything. Above all, it means seeing and letting go of your thoughts as they come and go. It means letting yourself be. If you feel trapped in time, non-doing is a way for you to step out of all the time on your hands by stepping into timelessness. In doing so, you also step out, at least momentarily, from your isolation, your unhappiness, and your desire to be engaged, busy, a part of things, doing something meaningful. By connecting with yourself outside the flow of time, you are already doing the most meaningful thing you could possibly do, namely to come to peace within your own mind, coming into contact with your own wholeness, reconnecting with yourself. Here is Eliot, again from “Burnt Norton”:
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time …
You could look at all the time you have as an opportunity to engage in the inner work of being and growing. Then, even if your body doesn’t work “right” and you are confined to the house or to a bed, even if you feel somewhat diminished from your former self, the possibility is still here to turn your life into an adventure and to find meaning in each moment. If you commit yourself to the work of mindfulness, your physical isolation might take on a different meaning for you. Your inability to be active in outer ways and the pain and regret that you may feel from it may become balanced by the joy of other possibilities, by a new perspective on yourself, one in which you are seeing optimistically, reframing the time that weighed on your hands as time to do the work of being, the work of non-doing, the work of self-awareness and understanding, the work of being present for and with others with kindness and compassion.
There is no end to this work, of course, and no telling where it might lead. But wherever that is, it will be away from suffering, away from boredom and anxiety and self-pity, and toward healing. Negative mental states cannot survive for long when timelessness is being cultivated. How could they when you are already embodying peace? Your concentrated and stable awareness serves as a crucible in which negative mental states can be contained and then transmuted.
And if you are able-bodied enough to do at least some things in the outside world, dwelling in non-doing will likely lead to insights as to how you might connect up with people and activities and events that might be meaningful to you as well as helpful and useful to others. Everybody has something to offer to the world—in fact, something that no other person can offer, something unique and priceless. And that, of course, is one’s own unique being. If you practice non-doing, you may find that, rather than having all this time on your hands, the days may not be long enough to do what needs doing. But that requires that you let the doing come out of being. In this work, you will never be unemployed, whether you have a job or not.
If you take a more cosmic perspective on time, none of us is here for very long anyway. The total duration of human life on the planet has itself been the briefest of eye blinks, our own individual lives infinitesimal in the vastness of geological time. Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard University paleontologist, pointed out that “the human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so—roughly 0.0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile.” Yet the way our minds represent time, it feels as if we have a long time to live. In fact, we often delude ourselves, especially early in life, with feelings of immortality and of our own permanence. At other times we are only too keenly aware of the inevitability of death and the rapidity of the passage of our lives.
Perhaps it is the knowledge of death, conscious or unconscious, that ultimately drives us to feel pressed for time. The word deadline certainly carries the message. We have many deadlines, those imposed by our work and by other people and those we impose on ourselves. We rush here and there, doing this and that, trying to get it all done “in time.” Often we are so stressed by the squeeze of time that we do what we are doing just to get through with it, to be able to say to ourselves, “At least that is out of the way” as we check it off our never-ending to-do list. And then it’s on to the next thing that needs doing, pressing on, pressing through our moments, until we are in the Whac-A-Mole situation again, just doing, doing, doing, as speedily as possible, to get it all done, knowing that we will never get it all done—and also sometimes realizing that if we are not careful, we will miss what is most precious and most important, and most easily forgotten in our own lives—namely, an embodied experience of who is doing all of this doing. In other words, once again: the domain of being!
Some doctors believe that time stress is a fundamental cause of disease in the present era. Time urgency was originally featured as one of the salient characteristics of coronary-disease-prone, or type A, behavior. The type A syndrome is sometimes described as “hurry sickness.” People who fit into this category are driven by a sense of time pressure to speed up the doing of all their daily activities and to do and think more than one thing at a time. They tend to be very poor listeners. They are constantly interrupting and finishing other people’s sentences for them. They tend to be very impatient. They have great difficulty sitting and doing nothing or standing in lines, and they tend to speak rapidly and to dominate in social and professional situations. Type A’s also tend to be highly competitive, easily irritated, cynical, and hostile. As we have seen, the evidence points to hostility and cynicism as the most toxic elements of coronary-prone behavior, although others view those elements as coming out of time urgency. But even if continuing research shows that time urgency by itself is not a major factor in heart disease, it nevertheless has a toxicity all its own. If not handled well, time stress can easily erode the quality of a person’s life and threaten health and well-being.
Robert Eliot, a cardiologist and stress researcher, described his own mental state and his relationship to time prior to his heart attack—and this in the era before the Internet—as follows:
My body cried out for rest, but my brain wasn’t listening. I was behind schedule. My timetable read that by the age of forty I should be the chief of cardiology at a major university. I was forty-three when I left the University of Florida at Gainesville and accepted the position of chief of cardiology at the University of Nebraska in 1972. All I had to do was run a little faster and I’d be back on track.
Yet he found himself running into roadblocks of various kinds in his efforts to establish an innovative cardiovascular research center.
I came to feel that the walls were closing in on me and that I would never break free to make my dream a reality.
Desperately I did what I had been doing all my life. I picked up the pace. I tried to force things through. I crisscrossed the state to provide on-the-spot cardiology education to rural Nebraska physicians and build support among them for the university’s cardiovascular program. I scheduled academic lectures across the country, continually flying in and out at a moment’s notice. I remember that on one trip on which my wife, Phyllis, helped with the business arrangements, a seminar went superbly, and on the plane ride home Phyllis wanted to savor the memory. Not me. I was rushing through the evaluation forms, worrying about how to make the next seminar better.
I had no time for family and friends, relaxation and diversion. When Phyllis bought me an exercise bike for Christmas, I was offended. How could I possibly find time to sit down and pedal a bicycle?
I was often overtired, but I put that out of my mind. I wasn’t concerned about my health. What did I have to worry about? I was an expert in diseases of the heart, and I knew I didn’t have any of the risk factors. My father had lived to be seventy-eight and my mother, at eighty-five, showed no sign of heart disease. I didn’t smoke. I wasn’t overweight. I didn’t have high blood pressure. I didn’t have high cholesterol. I didn’t have diabetes. I thought I was immune to heart disease.
But I was running a big risk for other reasons. I had been pushing too hard for too long. Now all my efforts seemed futile.… A feeling of disillusionment descended on me, a sense of invisible entrapment.
I didn’t know it then, but my body was continuously reacting to this inner turmoil. For nine months I was softened for the blow. It came two weeks after my forty-fourth birthday.
As he described it, after a disappointing confrontation one day, he got very angry and was unable to calm down. After a sleepless night and a long drive to a speaking engagement, he gave a medical lecture. Following a heavy lunch, he tried to diagnose cases, but his mind was foggy and his eyes blurry. He felt dizzy. These were the conditions that immediately preceded his having a heart attack.
Dr. Eliot’s heart attack led him to write a book called Is It Worth Dying For? in which he described how he came to answer that question with a resounding “No” and went on to change his relationship to time and to stress. He described his life leading up to his heart attack as “a joyless treadmill.” And this from a person who in some way obviously loved his work.
Norman Cousins, the prominent magazine editor and leading intellectual, described the conditions leading up to his heart attack in much the same way in his book The Healing Heart—in the era before the airport security instituted following the attacks of September 11, 2001:
The main source of stress in my life for some years had been airports and airplanes, necessitated by a heavy speaking and conference schedule. Battling traffic congestion en route to airports, having to run through air terminals … having to queue up for boarding passes at the gate and then being turned away because the plane had been overbooked, waiting at baggage carousels for bags that never turned up, time-zone changes, irregular meals, insufficient sleep—these features of airline transportation had been my melancholy burdens for many years and were especially profuse in the latter part of 1980.… I returned from a hectic trip to the East Coast just before Christmas only to discover that I was due to leave again in a few days for the Southeast. I asked my secretary about the possibility of a postponement or a cancellation. She carefully reviewed with me the special facts in each case that made it essential to go through with the engagements. It was obvious … that only the most drastic event would get me out of it. My body was listening. The next day I had my heart attack.
Notice the sense of time pressure and urgency in the words themselves in both these passages: “behind schedule,” career “timetable,” “I picked up the pace,” “I tried to force things through,” “no time for family or friends,” “joyless treadmill,” “battling traffic,” “having to run” to make the plane, “having to queue up,” “waiting” for baggage, dealing with “time-zone changes.”
Time pressures are not solely the province of successful executives, physicians, and academicians who travel a lot. In our post-industrial and now totally digital society, all of us are exposed to the stress of time. We strap on our watches in the morning, pocket our smart phones with our calendars and appointments, our emails and our Twitter feeds, and we get going. We conduct our lives by the clock, and squeeze everything else into the “in-between” or “on-the-way-to” moments. The clock dictates when we have to be where, and woe to us if we forget too often. Time and the clock drive us from one thing to the next. It has become a “way of life” for many of us to feel driven every day by all our obligations and responsibilities and then to fall into bed exhausted at the end of it all. If we keep up this pattern for long stretches without adequate rest and without replenishing our own energy reserves, breakdown will inevitably occur in one way or another. No matter how stable and robust your allostatic circuits, they can eventually be pushed over the edge if they are not reset and recalibrated from time to time—to reduce the allostatic load, the everyday wear and tear.
Nowadays we even transmit time urgency to our children. How many times have you found yourself saying to little children, “Hurry up, there’s no time” or “I don’t have time”? We hurry them to get dressed, to eat, to get ready for school. By what we say, by our body language, by the way we rush around ourselves, we are giving them the clear message that there is simply never enough time.
This message has been getting through to them all too clearly. It is not uncommon now for children to feel stressed and hurried at an early age. Instead of being able to follow their own inner rhythms, they are scooped up onto the conveyor belt of their parents’ lives and taught to hurry and to be time-conscious. This may ultimately have deleterious effects on their biological rhythms and cause various kinds of physiological disregulation as well as psychological distress, just as it does in adults. For instance, high blood pressure begins in childhood in our society, with small but significant elevations detectable even in five-year-olds. This is not true in non-industrial societies, where high blood pressure is virtually unknown. Something in the stress of our way of life beyond just dietary factors is probably responsible for this. Perhaps it is the stress of time.
In earlier times, our activities were much more in step with the cycles of the natural world. People stayed put more. They didn’t travel very far. Most died in the same place they were born and knew everybody in their town or village. Daylight and darkness dictated very different life rhythms. Many tasks just could not be done at night for lack of light. Sitting around fires at night, their only sources of heat and light, had a way of slowing people down—it was calming as well as warming. Staring into the flames and the embers, the mind could focus on the fire, always different, yet always the same. People could watch it moment by moment and night after night, month after month, year after year, through the seasons, and see time stand still in the fire. Perhaps the ritual of sitting around fires was mankind’s first experience of meditation.
In earlier times, the rhythms of people were the rhythms of nature. It was a wholly analog world. A farmer could only plow so much by hand or with an ox in one day. You could only travel so far on foot or even with a horse. People were in deep connection with their animals and their needs. The animals’ rhythm dictated the rhythms of the day and the limits of time. If you valued your horse, you knew not to push it too fast or too far. You could only communicate to people face-to-face, or, in a pinch, through drumming or smoke signals.
Now we can live largely independent of those natural rhythms. Electricity has given us light in the darkness, so that there is much less of a distinction between day and night—we can work after the sun goes down if we have to, or want to. We never have to slow down because the light has failed. We also have cars and tractors, telephones and jet travel, radios and televisions, photocopying machines, laptops and tablets and ever smaller and more powerful wireless devices of all kinds, and an alternate universe of sorts in the Internet. These have shrunk the world and reduced by a staggering amount the time that it takes to do things, find things out, communicate, go someplace, or finish a piece of work. Computers have amplified to such an extent the ability to get paperwork and computations done that, although they are tremendously liberating in some ways, people can find themselves under more pressure than ever to get more done in less time. The expectations of oneself and of others just increase exponentially as the technology provides us with the power to do more and more and do it faster and even faster. Instead of sitting around fires at night for light and warmth and something to look into, we can throw switches and keep going with whatever we have to do. We can also watch television and YouTube videos, surf the Web, or live in the blogosphere and think we are relaxing and slowing down. Actually, it may be just more sensory bombardment.
And in the near future, what with the next waves of technological products either here already or on the way—online shopping, “smart” television, narrowcasting of advertisements, electronic homes with voice-activated functions, and of course personal robots you can talk to and have look after whatever needs looking after—we will have more and more ways to distract ourselves, more and more ways to stay busier and busier and to do more and more things simultaneously, with expectations rising accordingly. Already, we can drive and do business (and increase the accident rate enormously through inattention and multitasking behind the wheel), we can exercise and process information, we can read and watch programs on split screens on our tablets, we can watch two or three or four things at once on television. We will never be out of touch with the world and with the content and demands that we can easily become addicted to. But will we ever be in touch with ourselves?
Just because the world has been speeded up through technology is no reason for us to be ruled by it to the point where we are stressed beyond all limits and perhaps even driven to an early grave by the treadmill of modern life. There are many ways you might free yourself from the tyranny of time. The first is to remind yourself that time is a product of thought. Minutes and hours are conventions, agreed upon so that we can conveniently meet and communicate and work in harmony. But they have no absolute meaning, as Einstein was fond of pointing out to lay audiences. To paraphrase what he was supposed to have said in explaining the concept of relativity, “If you are sitting on a hot stove, a minute can seem like an hour, but if you are doing something pleasurable, an hour can seem like a minute.”
Of course we all know this from our own experience. Nature is in fact very equitable. We all get twenty-four hours a day to live. How we see that time and what we do with it can make all the difference in whether we feel we have “enough time,” “too much time,” or “not enough time.” So we need to look at our expectations of ourselves. We need to be aware of just what we are trying to accomplish and whether we are paying too great a price for it or, in Dr. Eliot’s words, whether it is “worth dying for.”
A second way of freeing yourself from the tyranny of time is to live in the present more of the time. We waste enormous amounts of time and energy musing about the past and worrying about the future. These moments are hardly ever satisfying. Usually they produce anxiety and time urgency, thoughts such as “Time is running out” or “Those were the good old days.” As we have seen now many times, to practice being mindful from one moment to the next puts you in touch with life in the only time you have to live it, namely, right now. Whatever you are engaged in takes on a greater richness when you drop out of the automatic pilot mode and into awareness and acceptance. If you are eating, then really eat during this time. It might mean choosing not to read a magazine or watch TV while half consciously shoveling food into your body. If you are babysitting for your grandchildren, then really be with them. Do what it takes to become fully engaged. Time will disappear. If you are helping your children with their homework or just talking with them, don’t do it on the run or while talking on your phone or checking your email surreptitiously. Make the effort to be fully present. Make eye contact. Own those moments. Slow time down. Be in your body. Then you will not see others as “taking time” away from you. All your moments will be your own. And if you want to reminisce about the past or plan for the future, then do that with awareness as well. Remember in the present. Plan in the present.
The essence of mindfulness in daily life is to make every moment you have your own. Even if you are hurrying, which is sometimes necessary, then at least hurry mindfully. Be aware of your breathing, of the need to move fast, and do it with awareness until you don’t have to hurry anymore; then let go and relax intentionally, as best you can, and give yourself time to recover if you need to. If you find your mind making lists and compelling you to get every last thing on them done, then bring awareness to your body and the mental and physical tension that may be mounting, and remind yourself that some of it can probably wait. If you get really close to the edge, stop completely and ask yourself, “Is it worth dying for?” or “Who is running where?”
A third way of freeing yourself from the tyranny of time is devote some of it intentionally each day just to be, in other words, to meditate. We need to carve out and protect our time for formal meditation practice because it is so easy to write it off as unnecessary or a luxury; after all, it is empty of doing. When you do write it off and give this time over to doing, you wind up losing what may be the most valuable part of your life: time for yourself to just be.
As we have seen, in practicing mindfulness meditation in all the ways we have been exploring and engaging in, you are basically stepping out of the flow of time and residing in stillness, in an eternal present. That doesn’t mean that every moment you practice will be a moment of timelessness. That depends on the degree of concentration and calmness that you bring to each moment. But just making the commitment to practice non-doing, to let go of striving, to be non-judgmental about how judgmental you are at times, slows down that time for you and nourishes the timeless in you. By devoting some time each day to slowing down time itself, and by giving yourself the gift of a formal time dedicated to just being, you are strengthening your ability to act out of your being and fully inhabit the present moment throughout the rest of your day, when the pace of the outer and inner worlds may be much more relentless. That is why it is so important to organize your life around preserving some time each day for just being, for resting in awareness with no agenda other than to be awake.
A fourth way of freeing yourself from time is to simplify your life in certain ways. As recounted earlier, I once conducted an eight-week MBSR program just for judges. Judges tend to be sorely stressed by overwhelming caseloads. One judge complained that he never had enough time to review cases or to do extra background reading to prepare for them, and that he didn’t feel he had enough time to be with his family. When he explored how he used his time when he was not at work, it turned out that he religiously read three newspapers every day and also watched the news on television for an hour each day. The newspapers alone took up an hour and a half. It amounted to a kind of addiction.
Of course he knew how he was spending his time. But for some reason he hadn’t made the connection that he was choosing to use up two and a half hours a day with news, almost all of which was the same in each newspaper and on TV. When we discussed it, he saw in an instant that he could gain time for other things he wanted to do by letting go of two newspapers and the TV news. He intentionally broke his addictive news habit and now reads one paper a day, doesn’t watch the news on TV, and has about two more hours a day to do other things.
Simplifying our lives in even little ways can make a big difference. If you fill up all your time, you won’t have any. And you probably won’t even be aware of why you don’t. Simplifying may mean prioritizing the things that you have to and want to do and, at the same time, consciously choosing to give certain things up. It may mean learning to say no sometimes, even to things you want to do or to people you care about and want to help, so that you are protecting and preserving some space for silence, for non-doing—and for everything you have already said yes to.
After the day-long silent mindfulness mini retreat at the hospital in week six of the MBSR program, a woman who had been in pain for a number of years discovered that the next day she had no pain at all. She also woke up that morning feeling differently about time. It felt precious to her in a new way. When she got a routine call from her son, saying that he was bringing over the children so that she and her husband could babysit for them, she found herself telling him not to bring them, that she couldn’t do it just then, that she needed to be alone. She felt she needed to protect this amazing moment of freedom from pain. She felt she had to preserve the preciousness of the stillness she was experiencing that morning rather than to fill it, even with her grandchildren, who she of course loved enormously. She wanted to help her son out, but this time she needed to say no and to do something for herself. And her husband, sensing something different in her, perhaps her inner peacefulness, uncharacteristically supported her.
Her son couldn’t believe it. She had never said no before. She didn’t even have anything she was doing that day. To him it seemed nuts. But she knew, perhaps for the first time in quite a while, that some moments are worth protecting, just so that nothing can happen—because that “nothing” is a very rich nothing.
There is a saying: “Time is money.” But some people may have enough money and not enough time. It wouldn’t hurt them to think about giving up some of their money for some time. For many years I worked three or four days a week and got paid accordingly. I needed the full-time money, but I felt the time was more important, especially when my children were little. I wanted to be there for them as much as I could. Then I worked full-time at the hospital and medical school for many years. This meant I was away from home more, and I felt the pressure of time more in many ways. As best I could, I practiced non-doing moment by moment within the domain of all the doing, and tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to remember not to overcommit myself.
I am lucky to have a lot of say in how much I work, as well as what I do. And the work that I do, in all its guises, is a labor of love. Most people don’t have that much of a say in what they do and how much they work. Still, there are many ways in which it is possible to simplify your life. Maybe you don’t need to run around so much or have so many obligations or commitments. Maybe you don’t have to have the TV on all the time in your house. Maybe you don’t need to use your car so much. Maybe you don’t need to be on your cell phone as much as you are. And maybe you don’t really need so much money. Giving some thought and attention to the ways in which you might simplify things will probably start you on the road toward making your time your own. It is yours anyway, you know. You might as well enjoy it. You might as well inhabit all your moments. They are not “yours” forever.
Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by a journalist, “You have been working at least fifteen hours a day, every day for almost fifty years. Don’t you think it’s about time you took a vacation?” To which Gandhi replied, “I am always on vacation.”
Of course, the word vacation carries within it the meaning of “vacant, empty.” When we practice being completely in the present, life in its fullness is totally accessible to us at all times, precisely because we are outside of time. Time becomes empty and so do we. Then we too can always be on vacation. We might even learn how to have better vacations if we practiced all year long.
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets