EKROur 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.
Today we know what time it is at every point on the globe, but before the mid–nineteenth century, we measured time more casually. The advent of rail travel made stricter scheduling a necessity, so in 1883 the American and Canadian railroads adopted the system we still use of four time zones in North America. The plan was considered radical: many felt that the time zones and standards of time were insults to God. Today, we accept our watches and alarm clocks as the truth. We even have a “national clock” in the Naval Observatory, an “official timekeeper” for the United States. But this “national clock” is actually a computer that averages the findings of fifty different clocks.
Time is a useful measurement, but it has only as much value as we give it. Webster’s defines time as “an interval separating two points on a continuum.” Birth appears to be the beginning and death the ending, but they are not, they are just points on a continuum.
Albert Einstein pointed out that time is not constant, that it’s relative to the observer. And we now know that time passes at different rates depending on whether you are standing still or moving. Time runs differently if you take a trip on a spaceship or even a plane or subway. In 1975 the navy tested Einstein’s theory, using two identical clocks; they placed one on the ground and the other in a plane. For fifteen hours the plane flew while lasers were sent between the two clocks comparing time. Just as Einstein had stated, the time was slower in the moving plane. Time is also dependent on perception. Imagine a man and a woman together in a movie theater, watching the exact same movie, except she loves the film while he hates it. For her, the movie ends too soon. For him, it lasts forever. Both he and she agree that the movie started at 7 P.M., and that the final credits rolled at 8:57 P.M. But they don’t agree on the experience of that one hour and fifty-seven minutes. In a tangible way, one person’s time is not another’s.
We wear wristwatches—and synchronize them—to make sure we show up for the meeting, 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 communicate and coordinate. But when we go further, insisting that the arbitrary designation 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 perception.
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 continually 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.
Change is saying good-bye to an old, familiar situation and facing a new, unfamiliar situation. Sometimes it’s not the old or the new that unnerves us, it’s the time in between. Ronnie Kaye, author of Spinning Straw into Gold and a two-time breast cancer survivor, says, “In life when one door closes, another door always opens . . . but the hallways are a bitch.” That is how change works, it usually begins with a door closing, an ending, a completion, a loss, a death. Then we enter an uncomfortable period, mourning this completion and living in the uncertainty of what is next. This period of uncertainty is hard. But just when we feel we can’t take it anymore, something new emerges: a reintegration, a reinvestment, a new beginning. A door opens. If you fight change, you will be fighting your whole life. That’s why we need to find a way to embrace change, or at least to accept it.
When we ask someone “How old are you?” we are really asking them “What time are you?” We’re trying to slap a frame of reference on the person by bringing the past into play. When I find out how old you are, I know what memories you are likely to have. Depending on your age, you may know all about the Marshall Plan, Jackie O., the first moon walk, dial phones, disco, or DOS. I can call this information up in a friendly way, singing old Beatles songs with you. I can bring it back in a hostile way, thinking that you’re a fool to have gotten caught up in “flower power.” In either case, I’m not seeing you exactly as you are now. I’m judging by what I see as the sum of your past experiences.
It’s liberating to step away from perception. We’ve all heard lines like “You don’t look forty,” and the reply “This is what forty looks like.” The first person is essentially saying “you don’t fit my perception.” The second person is pointing out that this is what forty years old looks like on me—don’t define me by your expectations.
We don’t value age in Western culture. We don’t see wrinkles as part of life; they’re something to be prevented, hidden, removed. Yet as much as we miss the energy and buoyancy of youth, most of us wouldn’t want to retrace our steps because we also vividly remember the confusion of those years. We reach middle age with a better understanding of what life is about, and we don’t have time for the extraneous nonsense. We know who we are and what will make us happy. Once we have learned this lesson, we would not trade it for our youth again. There is a comfort in this wisdom and in the recollection that youth is many things, not all of them easy. It may be the age of innocence, but it is also the age of ignorance. It is the age of beauty; it is also the age of painful self-consciousness. It is often the age of adventure and, just as often, the age of stupidity. For many the dreams of youth become the regrets of the old, not because life is over but because it was unlived. 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.
EKRA man shared a story about his ninety-two-year-old mother. “I took her on a vacation to her hometown, Dallas. We were on a new plane. I watched my mother struggling to open the bathroom door, which was fitted with new door handles that were flush with the panel. She was used to knobs and handles with buttons.
“Early the next morning, the fire alarm went off in the hotel. By the time I got to her room she was outside the door in her nightgown, startled. She was also angry, because she had forgotten to grab her magnetic card key and the door had locked behind her. She was in a panic, not sure how she would get back in, not to mention being undressed. After the trip she told me, ‘I don’t belong here anymore. I don’t know how to use a microwave, I can’t find a TV with a dial to change the channel, I don’t know how to use cards instead of keys, and all my friends are gone. Time has moved on, but I’ve been left behind.’ It was hard to hear. It would have been even harder to understand, but on the trip I saw how frustrating and complicated life had become for my mother.”
When we look at the night sky, we are literally 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 memories 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 superimpose 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 anticipation. 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—if we can focus our awareness on the present, if we 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 living 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 computer. 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 listened 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 such 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. You’ll have a better experience with your spouse and will make a better presentation 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 relationship 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 certain about the past. We don’t know if it really happened the way we think it did. And certainly 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. Scientists have speculated that time is not linear, 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?
DKFrank and Margaret had been married for over fifty wonderful years. Devotedly in love with each other, they were inseparable. When Margaret became terminally ill, she said, “I can accept this illness. I can accept that I’m going to die. The hardest thing for me to accept is that I’m going to be without Frank.”
As Margaret’s disease progressed, she was more and more disturbed by the prospect of this ultimate separation. Hours before she died, she turned to Frank, who was sitting at her bedside. Her mind was clear and alert, for she had not taken any medications. She said, “I’m going to be leaving soon. And it’s finally okay.”
“What has made it okay for you?” he asked.
“I’ve just been told I’m going to a place where you already are. You will be there when I get there.”
Is it possible that Frank is simultaneously sitting in the hospital room and waiting for his beloved wife in heaven? Perhaps. Or perhaps the questions revolve around our perception of time. For Frank, who lives and breathes in time, it may be five, ten, or twenty years before he sees Margaret again. But if she is going to a place where there is no more time, it may seem that he arrives a second behind her. Time is longer for the survivor than for the one who dies.
When a doctor tells people that they have a terminal illness, their feelings about time become intense. Suddenly they fear there’s not enough of it. Here’s another of life’s contradictions: moving from abstract to real, you see your time as limited for the first time. But does any doctor really know when someone has six months? No matter what we know about the average length of survival, you cannot know when you will die. You have to grapple with the reality of not knowing. Sometimes the lesson becomes clear. Standing 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 requirements 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 proclaim the death premature.
Beethoven was “only” fifty-seven when he died, yet his accomplishments were tremendous. 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 concept 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 possibilities 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.