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Our relationship to time

By Paul BoksermanPublished 3 years ago โ€ข 3 min read
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A calendar (Pexels)

I'll assume you've heard somewhere that "time is an illusion." โ€‹โ€‹Indeed, time isn't metaphysically "here" like a pencil, but the cyclical patterns in front of mathematics are. Reality is a reiterating supercomputer with hardware beyond our mammalian comprehension.

Everything is in constant motion while we're along for the ride. But time is neither the place where life happens nor a feature of our reality.

So patterns are here, and time is their measure. By analogy, meters are an illusion; distance is not. Revolutionary stuff.

The rub

Time, cut and dry, is the spectre of our impulse to recognize patterns and establish "order." Some order makes sense. Days are revolutions on Earth's axis. Months measure the lunar cycle. Years are trips around the sun. But weeks are arbitrary.

If a week tracks some alignment of our solar system, does it count Pluto? What about another cosmological phenomenon that looks periodic but, centuries later, turns out to be an interstellar dust bunny (or vice versa).

So why is a month 4 weeks of 7 days and not 7 weeks of 4 days? Everything could be organized by even and odd days for 13 months. 13 months of 28 days, and any day can have the extra 0.6 seconds it needs to account for an average of 365.2422 days in a year, thus eliminating leap years and unevenly numbered months (assuming my math is right).

Meanwhile, here-and-now doesn't care if it's Wednesday or Sunday.

Assuming the reality of time distracts us from life

Obvious statement: we'd all choose activities that spark peace, profit, or purpose over something that, left undone, changes nothing. Self-care is a high-ROI activity, but deadlines, quarters, minimum hours, and hourly rates distract us from what matters.

Someone usually mentions here, "but I have to work to eat." Fair enough, I eat too. But to think that hours a day or days a week will lead to some final state of fulfilled contentment is as much an illusion as weekdays and weekends.

Collective trust in scarcity for scarcity's sake is one-dimensional and has led to our sinking ship of a world "order." Lucky for us, the self evolves faster than the collective.

I find it hard to believe that there isn't one hour on an arbitrary timeframe that can't be devoted to something wholeheartedly pleasant. The hard part is picking just one of the infinite options. Whether you've found it or you're searching, the practice is easy. Set a reminder for the first day of every month, once a week, or every other day, and do the thing.

Tired, distracted, bored, lazy

Don't get me wrong, giving intelligible shape to a form's idea takes effort. I have music on loop nearly always, but even with a rerun of 10 easy-to-watch seasons in the background, you'll surprise yourself in 6 months. The point is communing with yourself and the stream of conjecture that guides us.

Once you start, repetition creates happy chemicals in our brain, so "use cases" feel secondary. But many of us sit on the sides, "five days on, two days off" for decades. A lifetime later, we wonder, "how has nothing happened?"

Don't get me wrong, structured time is dangerously effective, but calendars only count quantitative units. We occasionally take a day for qualitative content (holidays), but that's the exception - not the rule. If we don't take our own time, life drifts further and further away from our intentions.

Find something you like doing, make as much time as your life allows, and get to it. No matter what we seek, it's always resolved through method.

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I write content like this every month

self care
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About the Creator

Paul Bokserman

Life's long enough to cultivate inner peace and too short not to.

peaceful.ventures

@peacesofpaul on Twitter

Paul Bokserman on LinkedIn

Content & Copywriter to The Arcane Bear

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