T-Minus

When you are measuring life, you are not living it.

Time is an illusion. Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time. I'm afraid of time I mean, I'm afraid of not having enough time. Not enough time to understand people, how they really are, or to be understood myself. I'm afraid of the quick judgements or mistakes everybody makes. You can't fix them without time. I'm afraid of seeing snapshots, not movies. Life is a funny thing. We only get so many years to live it, so we have to do everything we can to make sure those years are as full as they can be. We shouldn't waste time on things that might happen someday, or maybe even never. Time and I have quarreled. All hours are midnight now. I had a clock and a watch, but I destroyed them both. I could not bear the way they mocked me. Time goes faster the more hollow it is. Lives with no meaning go straight past you, like trains that don’t stop at your station. Time is the most valuable thing that a man can spend. It’s always about timing. If it’s too soon, no one understands. If it’s too late, everyone’s forgotten.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is. We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.

Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to. And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy happiness is the longing for repetition. It's worth making time to find the things that really stir your soul. That’s what makes you really feel alive. You have to say ‘no’ to other things you’re used to, and do it with all your heart. Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow. Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time past and future the more you miss the now, the most precious thing there is. Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters. There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heart. So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness in a landscape selected at random is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?" That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.

This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road our path. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified. Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life. The main problem with this great obsession for saving time is very simple: you can't save time. You can only spend it. But you can spend it wisely or foolishly. Nevertheless, I can tell you that you will awake someday to find that your life has rushed by at a speed at once impossible and cruel. The most intense moments will seem to have occurred only yesterday and nothing will have erased the pain and pleasure. Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough. Every moment is the paradox of now or never.

Today will die tomorrow.