Wednesday, 12 September 2012

Words to a Friend Anxious to not Waste Time

You need to slow down, I think. You are brilliant, but a brilliant
mind needs time to reflect and digest things... to absorb them. I
think you see that natural use for time as a hindrance now. ...

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"I've had plenty of time to think & reflect. Soon the time will come to stop thinking and start doing something".
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As for the natural use of time, I emphasize the word -use-. Enlivening a moment, giving pulse to a possibility- this is what I mean, not something opposed to thinking. This is thinking being carried out, reflection being lived, and it takes time. Not the marked, past-tense, alien time of how-long-did-that-lap-take, but the 1 second-per-second being & doing time.

You will never redeem what is spent. Do not begrudge what time it takes for you to shift from A to B, etc. Time taken is your friend, insomuch that it co-operates with you as you co-operate with it.  This is no trivial thing: this is the difference, right here, between living graciously, or living in anxiety and with slow-searing resent.  Time WILL take you if you do not take your time. My caution is merely to take no more, and no LESS than you need, and to let that be something less burdensome than dutiful and gratifying.

Many lauded with successes you seek are yet unhappy, and sour the world about them. You'd best beware. Seen another way: you are more real than your time... and it is made real only as it meets you, in the present you now enliven.