Time Traps

(part three)

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.
--Book of Ecclesiastes

All of us are trapped in time. We are too afraid not to accomplish our schedules. We are scared not to live our lives the way we want it, since Life is really too short. So we have tried to make things that can speed up our daily concerns. We multitask, almost wanting to grow more hands than what we have. We have made things instant. We do this in a belief that we don't want to waste so much time.

We are also trapped with how we had spent time. We dread many things in our past that we want to bury them in oblivion. And we tend not to risk because we do not want the past to happen again. We don't want to suffer again from the mistakes we made. We fear that history might repeat itself, so we spend our time preventing the future to repeat our past. All of our actions are driven by the fears of the past and longings of the future. We hardly live in the present.

And how often do we fix people in our minds as if they are still the same people we happened to meet in the past? We criticize, blame, mock, and badmouth them because of the belief that they could not change for the better. And it's funny because we also do these more to ourselves.

Let's again observe the two monks. Troubled and worried, the young monk burst in anger because of two reasons. First, he felt the old monk did something bad; and second, he thought that what the old monk did might hurt them. The young monk is trapped by his illusion of time: the baggage of the past mistake, and the burden of future embarrassment.

We are often in such a mindset that drags our lives and keeps us from living in fullness. Our past baggage makes our hearts heavy, keeping all the resentments, regrets and remorse we have created out of the experiences. Thus, we often recognize them as fate and we see ourselves victims. With these fears in mind, we are so afraid that we think Life won't spare us in the future, and we continue to act as if the past might happen again. And our future becomes just a projection of our past conditioning. Life becomes stagnant in this third universal form of attachment: living in the past and the future.

Time is not some kind of a reference point, in which we only begin to play between past and future. We regret the things we did, blame others for their shortcomings, or maybe we want to repeat the wonderful memories that have left us behind. We think that we must invest on our future, avoiding troubles that we think we cannot avoid. To live this way robs us of the precious gift of the present.

Indeed, Life has its own time, which is very different from ours. We have been living our lives trapped in an illusive time that our calendars and clock show us, and we haven't really experienced what time really is. Time is a misery to someone who runs before deadlines, while it is a mystery to someone who lives his or her life moment to moment. This poses us puzzling questions: What makes time difficult to grasp? Why is it so precious? It's about time to learn more about time.

In the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, the author (who was purportedly claimed as Solomon) contemplates on the nature of time. As you read it, it sounds like time is a matter of cycle, of repetitive events that sooner will bore us down. But as it nears the middle of the chapter, it shifts into a new way of seeing: "He [God] has made everything beautiful in his time." (Ecclesiastes 3:11) It leaves us a paradoxical view of time. Our sense of time that makes us shrink into limited deadlines would open us up to God's time, where every minute is an eternity. To do this is to allow the Now now.

This is the premise of Eckhart Tolle's famous book The Power of Now. Tolle elegantly teaches us that Now is "the precious thing there is". To be worried about past and future stops us to see the value of our Now, because this is the only time there is. Allowing the Now is to leave behind the past and future as fragments of our illusory view of life, and living the reality as it is. Letting go - detaching - of our time traps makes us more attached to the most important things in Life. And that is to Love.

Time is the word Rick Warren uses to spell Love in his book The Purpose-Driven Life. Gerald Jampolsky, author of Love is Letting Go of Fear teaches us the same thing, that "our only reality is Love." To Love is experienced neither in the past nor in the future. We can only begin Loving by appreciating that people, thing, and circumstance are all found only in God's time, in this present moment - only Now.

We are the Now that exist in this time and space. Our presence is the present we give to this Life, to the people we Love, to the purpose we live. Let not each minute be wasted on anxiety and worries of future, nor on guilt and blame of the past. Let us not be trapped by the time of our clocks and calendars. Our lifetime is far more valuable than the requirement of chronos, the time of the world. Living our life and being Love are the becoming of kairos, the time of Love. To Love is not to Love yesterday or tomorrow. To Love is to Love Now. This is the only time we have.

Writing about this topic takes my precious time. But the time I have spent is the amount of Love I am willing to express. The poet Kahlil Gibran asks us: "And is not time even as Love is, undivided and paceless?". Time and Love are both inseparable, and giving our time for Love never traps us, but brings us freedom. For whenever we spend our time in this very moment is our eternity of living in the sacred moment of Love.