This month’s guest is Florence Thum of Meanings and Musings. Lawyer, Therapist, College Professor, Writer, Blogger, Mother, and more. And no, those are not in any particular order. A lady from Down Under with a lot to say and lot of ways to say it.
As I venture here as a guest still wondering what I could possibly offer on RonovanWrites, I am reminded ‘write what you love’. At the moment, what I love is TIME because I have so little of it. It is what I covet most.
Time cannot be bought, it is beyond my control. If I do nothing, if no one does anything, time will still pass in its own rhythm, in its own time.
Time is.
Of course my perception of how time passes, the judgment I bring to its passing and to my being in it as it passes, is my own. That is my reality, no one else’s.
It took a long time for me to understand the old adage ‘time flies when you are having fun’. It is not about forgetting time when I am having fun. It is about not measuring it, not watching it go by but instead just being in it. When I am in the flow, I am deeply engrossed within that which I am passionate, that which I love, that which I am focused upon. And I stop measuring time. It is of no significance in that moment. In that moment, I am fulfilled.
We human beings created the measurement for time – the days, the hours, the minutes and seconds that ticked by. Yes, time ticking by because we invented the clock, and other technologies like the sun dial :-). You get what I mean. We privilege accuracy, consistency, being definite. But that is not how the rhythm of life is.
My day rarely ever goes to plan – the writing that took longer than I had imagined, the unexpected injury I am needed to attend to, the conversations that I am drawn into sometimes kicking and screaming because they are not what I had planned, but alas, life is sometimes erratic but always rhythmic if we can hear it.
What happened before we were obsessed or governed by the measurement of time? We watched the ebb and flow of the tides, the wane and wax of the moon, the height of the sun in the sky, we felt the heat or chill on our skin, the smell of the rain in the air. We listened to nature tapping out its rhythm, we followed its call and we responded. We then set to our tasks of living as time passed. Sometimes winter arrived later and harsher, sometimes summer arrived sooner and brought the rain. Whatever it might have been, we adapted. In our adapting, we tapped into our creativity, we harnessed our knowledge and we set out to overcome, to accomplish. Yes times were hard by our present standards. Yet the human species has survived by our ingenuity, our creativity.
Much of our present day lived experience is dictated by our measure of time. We adhere to order and structure, much of which is measured by when, at what time, we ought to do things, how much stuff we do within a duration of time, how often we must do a certain thing and for how long for it to be counted, to be valid as our expertise. Do we not question this? I do, sometimes. Sometimes when I am reminded to adhere to a deadline, an inner voice shouts, “says who?”
It occurs to me we have let some ‘muscles’ go slack – muscles to tap into our creativity, to take things within our stride, to respond with equanimity, to trust in our own resilience. Instead we mock and undermine those who push back against competing with time – those we labelled eccentric, dreamer, disordered, purposeless…just because the dictates of time have little hold on them, as they follow the rhythm of their own life.
We are guided by time, we do not control it. Rigid control of what we do with time will not make us masters of time.
So here I was trying to fit writing this post into a time frame, as other ‘things’ queue for attention. Well, it is not to be so. This post comes to me because of the significance of time to my daily living, it comes to me because there is a lesson to be learnt, it comes to me because it wants to be written. In the middle of writing I was tempted to stop because the time I had allocated to writing had expired. It took but a few seconds for me to notice the irony. Will I learn? Yes. I will write as long as I am inspired.
Time is. I cannot possess it, I cannot demand more of it. What I can do is change my perception of it. To experience time differently. To step out from the paradigm that time (to be precise, our measure of time) controls my life.
I will bask in the warmth of my children’s company for as long as we wish. I will read for as long as the book holds my attention. I will sit in my anger for as long as it requires processing. I will listen to reasons until they become excuses. I will BE IN the rhythm of my life, tapping out the beats of my heart.
So time aside, what is the rhythm of your life? Are you living it?
In love,
– FlorenceT
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