It started innocently enough. I was working with a retired client and asked how she had done with her movement practice during the last week. I had given her 5-10 minutes of movement explorations to support her learning. She sighed, “I haven’t done it once. I just have to make the time, otherwise it doesn’t happen.”
The whirlybirds went off in my head. How do you make time? How many times have you been told you’ve got to make better time on a project? Or how about making up for lost time? How do you lose time?
I remember decades ago reading a short science fiction story where instead of money, time was the currency, so that panhandlers would ask passersby, “Brother, could you spare some time?” We waste time. We spend time. We save time. We live on borrowed time. And yet, we have no idea at all what time is. I’ve even been told that time is money. Not only that, but it’s speeding up, so we never catch up with whatever illusory ideal we are pursuing.
My electric toothbrush has a little timer in it that “pauses” every 30 seconds so that each tooth surface gets its full share of the obligatory “2 minutes of brushing.” Sometimes, the pause happens so suddenly, I have no idea where the time went. Other days, the 2 minutes feels like an eternity. I began to pay attention (another kind of currency?) to this example of relativity. Feel free to try this and let me know if my research has validity.
When I pay attention only to the brushing, the time seems almost eternal. When I get distracted by daydreams, time passes quickly, but I also sometimes space right through the pause, so then I’m not sure if time has passed or not. When I quiet my mind, listen to my breath, sense my feet and relax my face, I no longer care about time.
Being merely human, I may never understand time. I have come to think of it less as a commodity and more like an environment. Like asking a fish about water, I can’t explain what it’s like to live in time. As I was writing this essay, I stumbled on a quote from Jorge Luis Borges, “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.” Recent theories are fascinating (check out this little video) but they still don’t explain why the moment I first laid eyes on my husband, time stood still, or why 60 years later, I can feel myself in my uncle’s living room watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, as if I’m really there now.
That’s the beauty of the human experience, we’re always learning, whether we want to or not! Another experience of being outside of time can be the sensation of timelessness of doing an Awareness Through Movement® lesson. So many transcend the linear experience of passing minutes.