Time

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All my clocks but two were stopped this morning. It took me a while to catch on to that fact (I’m not a ‘morning person’).
As I woke up, my alarm clock was flashing due to a short power outage that had occurred. A bit alarmed I went to the clock in my work room, only to find that the ‘seconds-arm’ was making its last feeble attempts to move at all - the time stuck at 7.15... AM or PM ~ no idea... The next clock, the one in the bathroom that worked fine yesterday, had even given up on its last attempts on keeping time at 8.45
The clock in the living room was still dutifully ticking the seconds away, showing that 8.45 AM indeed was the right time.
A sigh of relief. Not too late to get things done and to make it to my appointments for the day in time.

It made me think though ~ how much of our lives are ruled by keeping time. The appointments we set up with others rely on being there on time. But there are also the times in our day that are our anchors; divisions between one activity and another, like ‘dinner time’, time to watch the ten o’clock news, etc.

Somehow, keeping track of time gives us a sense of control over our busy lives.
As long as we are in time, there is order and structure in our lives.

To maintain this structure, we set aside time to perform our chores, we make time to visit friends, we loose time when we get stuck in heavy traffic, we run out of time as a deadline approaches... Time has  become the measuring stick with which we measure the amount of control we have over our lives.

At the same time, time itself has a fleeting aspect to it. When we have all the time in the world, it tends to disappear like sand running through our fingers. Time doesn’t seem a constant, it can stretch and move ~ when we are doing something that inspires us, time seems to go much faster than when we are doing something we really don’t like doing all that much.
And at some point we ask ourselves, where did the time go?

Yet time is.
In some sense there are only three points in time that have importance: the past, this moment, and the future.
The past is the path that has brought us where we are now, in this moment. The future is the direction our minds are going in order to shape and form the moment we are in...
Dwelling on the past is unproductive ~ could-have-beens and would-have-beens are bygones.
Worrying or doubting about things in our future is unproductive as this takes our awareness away from the moment that is ‘now’.

When we surrender control and allow ourselves to be in this moment as it unfolds, we shift into universal structure. And chances are, we are right on time!
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