Chasing Time
Days sometimes feel like a race against an emptying hourglass, each passing hour a nagging reminder of tasks left undone.
But yesterday morning, I did something different. Instead of diving headfirst into my usual pace, I quietly slipped on my shoes before the household stirred. I stepped outside into the cool fall air and began walking—straight through the forest and toward the edge of the ocean, a short distance from our home. I watched my feet as they negotiated tree roots and mud puddles, all the while preoccupied with the stream of tasks and to-dos swirling through my head.
About ten minutes in, I felt something pull my attention upward. The forest called to me through birdsongs and rustling branches. “Wake up! Lift your head! Look up!” it demanded. I tilted my face to the sky and felt something shift. Time—this thing I was used to chasing—expanded and swelled in all directions, vast and resounding. Suddenly, like waking from a dream that moments before felt very real, the plans and tasks dissipated. My mind tried to keep going (it had important things to do!), but the trees, the wind, the birds, and the sky held their ground and swelled even louder. I sensed the trees laugh with kind pity: “Oh, you silly human, with your thoughts and your plans.”
I recently listened to an interview with Aboriginal scholar Tyson Yunkaporta. He explained how, in his people’s language, time is only spoken about in connection to place. So, when you plan to meet someone, for example, you don’t say what time you are meeting but rather where you are meeting them. So steeped was I in a concept of linear time that I couldn’t grasp this when I heard it. Wasn’t time a fixed measurement? Something that organized our actions and obligations, giving us something universal to reference? How could knowing where you were meeting someone give an indication of when?
But standing there yesterday among the trees, I felt the truth of this infinite wisdom: that real time only exists here and now. It is a thing so vast and expansive that it cannot be controlled, as much as we try. All we can do is step into the stream and welcome its invitation to co-create. This looks like holding our plans loosely, tuning into the invitations of each moment, and trusting that it leads us somewhere beyond what our minds can conceive of.
When I look back at the sum of my life, I hope that I will have said yes more than no to the invitation to be here. Even for the hard parts, the messy parts, and the seemingly mundane parts.