Immanuel Kant demonstrated, in his Critique of Pure Reason, that time is a function of the mind . . . it does not exist in the material world, but is a grid that our minds lay over the material world in order to make it more livable.
But whatever lives in the mind can either live in the conscious part of it, or subconscious part of it. I’m beginning to realize that the great tragedy is that time typically resides in the subconscious part of our minds.
The subconscious mind is the realm of automation; it’s why you can drive home at night without getting lost while engrossed in a phone conversation, but need to get off the phone to navigate your way to a place you’ve never been before. Whatever you repeat get’s taken over by the basil ganglia before long, and at that point it becomes automatic; you don’t even have to think about it.
This is what happens to our experience of time at a very young age.
When we become conscious of time, we are surprised at how slow it moves. Just take five minutes and count it out in your mind, one second at a time, and try to stay conscious of each second, conscious of the temporal consecutivity of each moment. 5 minutes sounds like an incredibly short amount of time, but counting to 300 in your head is no small feat. You’ll find that throughout that 300 seconds you’ll be tempted to drift . . . the mind wishes to push time back into the recesses of the subconscious where it can be forgotten, and then it just seems to fly by.
But counting to 300 is a useful exercise for many reasons, the most important of which is that it causes you to come face to face with the lengthiness of time. Because we’ve forgotten time, allowing it to sink into the recesses of the subconcious, we always feel that we are at a time deficit; we don’t have enough. Not enough time . . . we are always pressed for time. But yet, when we take the time to count out our seconds, we find 300 of them in five short minutes!
Time eludes us only because we have forgotten it . . . because we take it for granted and treat it as though it had no value.
We are always looking for something to exchange it for . . . some activity that will help us pass the time away. Passing the time away simply means engaging in some exercise designed to push the experience of time further into the recesses of our subconscious mind . . . so far back that we have no experience of it at all. After all, the only difference between conscious and subconscious is experience; you experience the things that you remain conscious of and you don’t experience the things that dwell beneath the realm of your consciousness. Consciousness is experience!
Meaningless activities are an anesthetic that we take to numb our senses to the experience of time because time is painful when experienced without anesthetic. I don’t know why. Because when we come to the end of it, we wish we had more of it.
If we would only reclaim the moments of our lives . . . if we would live in them instead of pressing them down into the recesses of our minds . . . we would find that time doesn’t hurt so bad after all. It’s not the experience of time that hurts us; it is the sense of loss that comes from feeling as though we are wasting our time by failing to do something productive with it.
Counting to 300 feels like a waste of time, but it is not; it is actually just an experience of time. Watching a sitcom; that’s a waste of time! Gossip is a waste of time! Feeling like a failure is a waste of time! Most of what we do with our time is nothing short of a waste of it. The pain that you feel when you take the time to count to 300 is not the pain of wasting time, but the pain of relinquishing your right to waste it.
Wasting time actually makes us feel rich and powerful. I am master of my time and I can do with it anything that I want!
I think it would be better to experience our time until we have something useful to do with it.
Count to 300 . . .
Counting seems like a drab exercise, doesn’t it? I think we do need to experience time on a daily basis in order to appreciate the gift of it, but I don’t think that experience is supposed to be a boring one.
But rhythm on the other hand . . . rhythm is also an experience of time. Rhythm is a temporal aesthetic. Through rhythm we reclaim the moments of our lives and experience them as pure beauty . . .
Rhythm turns life into a dance.
Do you ever find yourself bobbin your head to a song that’s not even playing? You know what your head is doing? Manifesting the experience of time.
Rhythm is not only an experience of time; it is an interpretation of time. Rhythm is our way of saying that time is a good thing! It’s one way that we redeem the gift of time by celebrating it one moment – one beat, one measure – at a time.
The ancient fathers defined the Trinity as a dance: a perichoresis, or turning about. The Trinity is a circle of love, and it is ever turning, turning . . . reveling in the delight of itself.
Augustine, in his Di Trinitate, called the Father the Lover, the Son the Loved, and the Spirit the Bond of Love (vinculum amoris) between the Father and Son.
Circle of love, ever turning . . . God is a dance.
God is not just being; God is reveling, rejoicing. This is why it is imperative that we learn how to rejoice in the Lord always, because God is always rejoicing. God created time as a means of perpetuating the enjoyment of eternal love.
God’s got rhythm; it’s called grace, and it abounds.
