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We have to slow down,
because we do not have much time.
Zen saying
How much time I have left to live is up to me. I can choose to watch the evening light illuminating the top of the madrona tree outside my window, putting myself fully inside the golden moments as the sun descends, or I can turn back to the computer screen and let this interlude slip into the blur of tasks at hand.
To inhabit the moment in front of us more fully - it seems as though this should be a simple matter of deciding to do so - but our thoughts and anxieties distract us. Quieting the mind sufficiently is difficult. It is hard to stop hurrying mentally toward the next task, fretting about something in the future, or ruminating over something that happened the day before. Even if we vow not to squander the next hour through inattention, it happens. We slip back into our thoughts and forget to be awake. Our days run into each other without the distinction of our having paid attention, and we have the sense of hurtling swiftly towards the ending.
Throughout midlife, we bemoan the shortage of open time. We crave vacant and oceanic days, time without boundaries, only to fill what we call vacations with too many doings. A span without commitments of any kind, even a single unscheduled afternoon, is an elusive sweetness for most of us. It seems we need to attain a certain length of days before we become adept at living well.
An eighty-six year old woman volunteered at the day care center for the children of her retirement community's staff. She told me that the hours she spent there, holding children on her lap during nap time, were better than anything on her facility's activity calendar. "When a child falls asleep in my arms, sometimes I breathe in unison and go into that wonderful peace myself. I don't mean I fall asleep. I am awake - really awake - and listening to what's going on around me, but I am in some other sphere. It's terrific. They should charge for it."
Later life is the phase when hurrying may finally subside. We may be fortunate enough to reach the point where we start slowing down, doing less, and living more. Occasions when we pause for the splendor of light on a tree become more numerous as soon as we are available to experience them. As elders, we are better able to take things as they come in all domains, but especially in accepting the simple wonder of the sensate world, the here and now where peace resides.
At the age of seventy-one, a woman contrasted the frenetic pace of her younger years with the serenity of her current life: "I was so scattered. I was focusing on my children, on my work as a teacher, taking care of everything. I was running around all the time, barely keeping up. I was responsible for so many things. Now I can meditate. I am grounded. I can undertake something and stick with it. There's really no comparison."
The greatest divergence between the young and the old is in how time is experienced. As we get older, our relationship with time becomes increasingly intimate. The longer our past and the shorter our likely future, the more keenly aware we are of time passing. The closer we get to death, the more vivid is our consciousness of transience and the more urgent is our need to wrest meaning from our days. Time, and life itself, have significance only because of the approach of death. We need both our finitude and our awareness of getting older, not just as reminders of time's value but as touchstones for living well. Death imposes brevity and compels us to bestow worth.
There is almost nothing objective about time, beyond the numbers on a clock. The days are long but the years are short, says a proverb about motherhood. Whether we allow the moments of our lives to expand or contract is as subjective as it gets. I can decide to befriend the approach of death as a reminder to live well, or I can throw away entire afternoons with fruitless anxiety.
In later life, physical circumstances may grant us the necessity of reclaiming an attentive, singular focus. We may be unable to do three things at once. With slower mobility, we may again find reverence for being in another's company in a whole-hearted way. Putting aside the urgency of checking messages and getting things done, we may finally occupy the kind of time in which vibrancy is located and intimacy can flourish.
Until then, we must repeatedly remind ourselves to pause, to slow down for as much aliveness as we can muster. By refusing the insistence of haste, we can expand the hours in front of us. Sitting still and paying attention become a bold reply to evanescence, a kind of grabbing hold. By reveling in what we can see and hear and feel, we may find that time attains a pace that feels like living.
Adapted from: LIFE GETS BETTER: THE UNEXPECTED PLEASURES OF GROWING OLDER, Tarcher/Penguin, 2011.
