As I sit and watch the bumble bees bouncing from bloom to bloom on my Hydrangea, I wonder what time is like for them. Do they have a sense of before and after anything like I experience? Does time enter into their experience of being alive? How do they have a sense of how fast they are moving relative to other objects?
Just by watching them, I know that they must have very efficient neural processing because they move so fast. They change direction so quickly that they must have some way of absorbing and using information that allows such rapid movement. They seem to avoid bumping into one another and parts of plants. They would easily evade my hand if I tried to capture one of them. Their movement, fast as it is, seems adequately and successfully directed.
What would it be for me to experience the passage of time like a bumble bee? Because I would process information so fast, I think that my world would then seem, by comparison, to move more slowly. Would I then have more time to react, catch myself from bumping into the door, duck under the branch, dodge the ball coming directly at me?
For the most part, time has seemed to speed up much faster for me. Does this mean that because the days pass by more quickly that my thinking, my data processing has slowed down. Has my day become like a movie reduced to half speed to make the characters seem to move faster.
On the other hand, the time I spend in mindfulness practice almost makes time stand still. Time becomes less and less of a reference point. I sometimes seem to step outside of time. I think that this means that part of my mind has changed function. Rather than slow down, I think that my brain has somehow slipped into overdrive, a place where there is little reference to past and future. The energy of that place is palpable.
Maybe that is more what the bees experience. Maybe bee time is focused on the here and now, no past and no future. The bee reacts without reference to time. It is only I, the observer, who is constantly referencing the passage of what I know of as time. Maybe I am learning to live in bee time.