Time…who needs it?

The Practice of Being Happy. #12  Today, lets look at time. Not the time on the clock or the time it takes to get to work, but the time you need to be happy, the time you need for your life to work and your dreams to come true. That is the time we need to look at. Does it really exist?

We can begin our practice by noticing when time is not on our minds. What are we doing? Without getting into specifics, you’ll notice that time disappears when we are giving the present moment our full attention. Attention and time can’t exist together, can the. You can also notice that when you have full attention on some project or activity—and you can bet that if that activity is life threatening you will have great attention—you feel very alive. But as soon as you switch on the time mode, you are thinking about your activity, and measuring it, comparing it to what it should be or should not be, and suddenly, life has become flatter, compressed, and you don’t feel as alive, as full and complete as you did before time entered the mind.

See if you can notice this play between time and the present moment. We are here…then we are not. We are NOW, then we are in thought. And what is thought but an abstraction of NOW. Thought is the peeling of the apple. NOW is the core.

Our heart felt wish, our deepest desire is to eat the whole apple of life, yet all we get is the peeling, life thinned and stretched out in time. We live on the surface of life in a skin called time.