Time is a fickle thing; dragging for the twenty seconds you have to count out for the espresso to be ready in the morning, hurtling a decade between 50 and 60, but always moving, dragging us with it. However, twice in my life I have had a different experience of time, when I have felt that I was in the middle of a great plane of time, and I was stopped, suspended, going nowhere, just being. I associate those moments with great joy; for a moment I not only understood the concept of space-time, but was space time.
When I was nine I was in a town in Mexico with my mother; we were visiting someone she knew. I was walking in the street and I felt this sudden expansion upwards and outwards, starting inside me; I was in an unmoving center, and the street, the houses, the sky above seemed in that moment to be part of me, and infinite, and I was filled with happiness.
I could not say now how long this sensation lasted, indeed, the notion of ‘how long’ does not seem to apply, but in some ways its effects have lasted more than fifty years; I have always felt that no matter what, there is a window open somewhere.
The second time it happened was forty years later; I was on a bus in Bulgaria on my way away from the great national folk music festival in the town of Koprivchitsa. I was sitting by the window as the bus laboured up a hill in the morning and I can only say that I felt a sensation of letting go of time and settling, unmoving, into the middle of a vast space. I felt a great sense of peace. In writing this, this is the first time I associate the two events as being similar.
It is appropriate for me to be thinking about this now, as a two week school break ends, and I will be “rushing”, that is the word in my head, back to ‘the salt mine’. ( I just heard about salt mines in a great CBC “Ideas” podcast…my secondary school is no salt mine, but that is the sort of language we use.) I have always described the time in school as a sense of being ‘extruded’ through time. There is a bell marking every change all day long, and time appears to hurtle. If I were to consider now how I must approach it if I don’t want time to rush, I wonder if I have a physics problem, in effect. If space time is a plane on which planetary forms rest, bending it this way and that, why could I not stay on that plane, my mass bending it slightly wherever I am, and just experience time as nothing more than the stillness on which I live and change. Why must the sensation be of time passing, being lost, being money?
Or, perhaps this is a mindfulness problem; a sense of inner stillness. Perhaps if I believe I haven’t enough time, that I will have less, and if I understand I have nothing but time, it will slow the sense of barreling.
