I still put a lot of effort into timing my life. My mind is active in putting time as an overlay, another aspect of just about everything I do or that appears to happen around me. There are the occasions when I can experience, momentarily, the realm of no-time, timelessness, just the now. But even those experiences have a beginning and an end, a before and an after.
This business of time is a huge mystery for me. I seem to have a very developed skill of removing myself out of time by paying attention to imagined events. I can go back and replay the past, recreate the past, create a fantasy of the past. I am very capable of reaching into the future and imagining what could happen, planning what might happen, solving problems yet to arrive.
So there is an ability I have of stepping into the past or future. In fact, I have all the internal reaction as though I really am there, experiencing what might have happened or what might be in the future. It is much harder to put aside the past or the future and pay attention to what I am experiencing right now.
It almost seems that it is my mind that is doing the timing, that time might be an artifact of my own awareness. Is time an illusion like so many other things I have thought were real? Do events have a beginning and an end or is that something I have learned to impose in order to take the mystery and uncertainty out of my experience.
Slowly, I am learning to loosen my grip on the distinction between the past and the now. Is this the gift or the loss that comes with age? I am losing my sense of past time. As my “past” becomes my present, I am better able to accept and smile at the many embarrassing things I have done. I am much more tolerant of my mistakes. Today, I am aware that all those I have loved are no longer lost but are present, and I love them now.
I’m not sure how to deal with the future, except that there is a calmness that arises when I think of the future being now. Everything is OK, I can deal with it, surprises are exciting. Grasping is meaningless because everything simply is, there is nothing I can do to change it or control it.
Timing my life is very much a useful tool. But I think it may be an artifact whose usefulness is over-rated and may some day become obsolete for me. Until then, I am looking for little ways of exploring life timelessly .