Time is one of those things most of us don’t have enough of in our busy lives. We are “slammed” with so many things to do that we can’t conceive of adding more to a day. As a result, we rush through things we must do so we can do the things we want to do. We live on a treadmill set at maximum speed with time rushing by us, unchecked.
Our days are governed by our to-do list which must be accomplished so we can get to our bucket list. Our often-sleepless nights reflect our days, with thoughts running wildly through our mind. Moreover, the older we get, the faster time seems to go. Our crazy busy days turn into months and before we realize it, another year has passed. Our greatest fear is death, which will eventually end our time on earth.
The Buddhist way of framing time offers a solution to our rapid treadmill existence. First, a Buddhist would not say that time is rushing by us. That idea implies that we are different from time when, in fact, we are inseparable from the time in which we live. In other words, human beings carry our time with us from birth to death. We think of it as past, present, and future, as if those aspects of time were different from who we are. But we can’t separate our time from our story.
You’ve heard people say in jest, “This is my story, and I’m sticking to it.” A story always exists in time. Typically, something happened and then something else happened to form the story we have made up about ourselves. Remember, we are not our story, but the entity that remembers our commitments, keeping us on track and, yes, creating our best possible story. The story wouldn’t exist without the time that encompasses it. Similarly, we wouldn’t exist as who we are without our time. In this sense, we are time, which is a way of saying being human is inextricable from time.
“What is it that creates a problem with time? Could it be that the way we frame our relationship with time creates the problem?”
So, what is it that creates a problem with time? Could it be that the way we frame our relationship with time creates the problem? For instance, are we an island in a vast ocean of time that’s streaming past us? Or are we a boat floating along with the current of time? Within the former framework, we are separate from time, which allows for distortions in our perceptions of it, e.g., time seems to speed up as we age. Within the latter framework, however, we have no way of gaging the passage of time outside of ourselves. Thus, we are entirely in charge of framing our perception of time.
You’ve also heard it said that after we die, we live in eternity. This idea is part of the perceptual problem because we misunderstand the meaning of death and eternity. You may have also heard it said that we must die to ourselves before we can enter the kingdom of heaven. Similarly, you may have heard it said that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter heaven. There is spiritual truth to all these sayings.
After all, egoistic thinking frames our distorted perceptions of time, so we must pause our thinking to see life clearly as it occurs. Similarly, we should understand that eternity is simply the present moment. Little kids don’t live in the past or the future—the stuff of story. But in the ever changing, kaleidoscopic practice of living in the now.