“We are infinite and we are finite, all in the same breath. This is the way of natural things.” – Hannah McPherson
I found myself on a staycation for a week.
I’ve tried to read a book, listen to a podcast, listen to music.
I’m not even 3 hours into my first day, and I’m already bored and not knowing what to do. Now, since the point of this staycation is to get relaxed and settled, which I sometimes struggle with, I should be comfortable doing nothing.
However, I work hard, even at things like relaxing. I plan to take the week and clean house, run errands, work on my own creative projects, and take the world by a storm through personal productivity.
These are high goals I may not reach, but there is no harm in setting them. I’m sure my indecision will stop tasks, my need to relax may delay cleaning, errands may hit complications, but alas – I can still aim at the stars. Even if I only make it halfway, I will have gone farther than going nowhere at all.
This brings us to the title of this post, “The Matter of Time”.
This week may go by quickly or slowly, depending on the fluidity of each and every collective moment. However, when it is done it will feel as though it was quick and a lifetime all at once.
I stress a lot about time.
In the matter of our mortality, what we have is so limited, but in the moment, things tend to happen very slowly. They say things speed up as you get older, and they do, but not in the way you think.
We tend to, later in our lives, fill our days with more things. We fill our lives with so much purpose we can hardly contain it. In this sense, I’m defining purpose as things that get us out of bed in the morning and give our lives meaning, whatever that looks like for you.
So how do we deal with the Matter of Time?
We don’t. We simply show up. We witness, we participate, and then we (I would hope) go home. We go to wherever we came from. We did what we did, we saw what we saw, and those who knew us know and those who didn’t will never be the wiser.
We can look forward and backward at time, we can live in the present moment, but we do not control the current.
The current is a natural thing that runs through all things, specifically in this case the perception of time passing in our lives.
Some people call this “The Flow”.
They’ll tell you to go with the flow, which is perfectly acceptable. If you never did anything a day in your life except that, I think you’d turn out just fine; for example, when Harry Potter drinks the luck potion. He was in flow, and things just fell into place.
However, we are creatures of creation and action, so we like to move and swim within the current. We like to try to direct the flow. We, like old cowboys, try to wrangle and wrestle our time to get the most out of it.
Life is, in fact, just one wild ride.
As I look down the barrel of time for the next week, the next month, the next year, or for the rest of my life, I have one piece of advice for you: Go with the flow, wrangle the flow, whatever you choose…do it with intention. It is our free will and our choice that makes time so valuable.
I will try to live my next week with the intentions I had when I set out on this journey, but if they don’t live up to my expectations, it will be okay, because God-willing, there will be more time.
When you choose intentionally, just know time itself, the living-breathing phenomena it is, will sometimes veto your intentions and direct you somewhere more aligned for you.
Is time alive?
Not in the sense that a squirrel in the tree is alive, or you might be, but in the sense that electricity is alive, in the sense that nature itself has life and can be classified as parts of the whole that move us through the system we know as existence.
Time isn’t going to literally call you up and tell you what for, but it will gently guide you. Time is often misunderstood. If you start giving time the credit it deserves, you may find you’ll enjoy it quantifiably more.