I stayed up all night last week. I sat and sat, getting bored in the darkness. Hoping not to get caught by park rangers wandering Mt. Tabor. I don't think they wander much in the middle of the night. There was no wind in the late hours. It was odd to experience a quiet moment on the hills. The trees stood still for hours on end. Just darkness and then the slowly creeping light. As the sun started to rise - it was a drizzly, grey morning - the light began to fill the dome. Because of the clouds, there was never a moment when the rays burst forth, but each moment became a little lighter. I found myself wondering how I would know the morning when it arrived. (!) At some point, however, it was light enough to see dogs and people walking past me, which I took as my cue.
Reflecting I find myself thinking about the nature of time. I remember those moments of sitting in a classroom watching the rotating minute hand of a clock. It's not that you could actually see the movement of the clock, but through some amalgamation of remembered moments you sensed the movement. Even though, sometimes I really thought I could see that hand move. That's how it felt to watch the sun rise. It occurs to me that maybe this perception of the passage of time contains the secrets I'm looking for. Why would people meditate? Bruce Blair told me about realizing he didn't know when the candles blew out while sitting. This taught him something about awareness.
Perhaps, the passage of time is necessarily a moving and a stillness. I think this is why I feel so disheveled in NYC - there is no stillness. I get wrapped up in all the excitement and energy, and I convince my unbelieving self that to live means motion. But sitting beneath tall trees on a windless night tells a different story. These trees know stillness. I wonder how a 4000 year old tree experiences time. I imagine it's something like I do - the combination of movement and stillness. Is the tree aware of its own growth (probably not). It can, however, certainly mark the passage of time as it grows bigger. What about the fly? Does the fly feel like he moves in fast-forward? Or do we just move in relatively different senses of time? And to the tree, does he feel that his life is so long, or does he experience life and death just as I do? I imagine that the passage of time is really just a subjective occurrence, and that to sit and understand the nature of this most perplexing of things is to know the world.
Inch by inch --
Little snail
Creep up and up Mt. Fuji
To change ourselves is to understand motion and stillness as two aspects of time. Every moment must stand alone, and therefore we must choose how we stand. However as the moments are strung together, our life turns into what we will it. But what a long and slow process it can seem! Maybe that is the deliciousness of it. Maybe we actually derive our power from the possibility of seeing time as a standalone moment. I don't believe St. Exupery when he talks about the lamplighter in Le Petit Prince. He says that the lamplighter lights and puts out his lamp every day and night, but through some twist of fate, his planet spins faster and faster. When the little Prince visits, he is lighting and putting out his lamp once per minute. Because of this, he cannot rest. I think that God has let our rope out much further, taking away such oppression and leaving us with the possibility of a quiet moment that stares into our face, compelling us to know what is.
Einstein said, relativity is the fact that one minute with a hand on a hot stove feels like one hour, and one hour sitting near a pretty girl feels like one minute. If I were really aware, wouldn't each of those moments feel like one minute? I seem to be bouncing about between extremes, and not just in reference to time, but in all my life. Too much salt, too little. Too much body motion, too little. Too much self-deprecation, too little critique. Much of life seems to be found in the swing of the pendulum, whereas I only feel the stopping points. It seems that everything well done follows the Buddha's (or Aristotle's) middle way. The perfect ratio of anything isn't marked by anything. To find this place of perfection then is to train one's self to be sensitive. We start to develop an intuitive sense of what is right - where to go, who to be. To live in time then seems to be a search for this middle way - finding harmony between the stillness and the ever changing.
