Time

Time.
Seems every body wants more of it. Life is short, we say. There's not enough time in the day! we say, in that pleading way. Er... who are you asking for more?

And then that old chestnut - I don't have time to meditate.
But meditation creates time! I remind myself. Doesn't matter. Once you're off the wheel you're off. It takes six months to create a habit.

I think its not more time we want. Its timelessness. Its the sense of not-time. Not having to rush, to have a deadline, to not have enough hours in the day for all the things we have to do.

We'll have time when we're dead. Plenty of it. Or rather, we'll have not-time. And that's what we're homesick for. The feeling of now.

Well, its definitely speeding up, as we hurtle towards the mythical date in 2012. Time is melting, warping, speeding up... becoming meaningless!

And will keep on doing so.

Have you ever played time games with yourself? You know you're late but you insist that time become elastic and stretch for you, and somehow, miraculously, it does. It just does. I forget this, but when I've done it with absolute assured insistence, it has worked. Within reason, of course. And of course, if you assert often enough and with enough conviction, there's just no time! the universe complies. Those obedient laws of time and space.

This morning I was awake before 4. I got up, ungroggy for once. I sat on my meditation cushion. It felt airless. I got up to open the window. I sat. I was cold. I got up to get my wrap. I sat. I breathed. The cat demanded my lap. I ignored. My back hurt. The other cat came and the two of them squabbled. I got up to let them both out. I sat.

And sat. My brain squabbled with itself. Ego sniped at breath. Shoulders hurt. Birds sang, twittered, scraped and creaked.

My spine unfurled by a hundredth of a millimetre. Then another. Breath lengthened me. Shoulder knot popped. Birds squabbled with my neck vertebrae. With my sitting bones.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to stop. Time. Knotted in every crunch of breath I felt the silted layers of time across roots and tangled impact of thought waves, my poor aching back. My poor racing brain.

Meditation creates time. It became a song, a groan. A lie. A truth. A clever thing to say later in a blog.

And then, for a breath, or a song or a cycle of breaths, I felt it. Not-time. A brief dip in the ocean, bracketed by a feeling of my day rushing towards me.

The seeds of it are there now. For today, I am not in a hurry.