This week I have been revisiting a favourite book - Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte. His thoughts about time, work and creativity in this book are a beautiful melody sung with a pitch perfect tenor voice (in my mind), and they sum up beautifully my thoughts this week about time. Time to create, time to do the things that need to be done in this life, and time to experience the spaciousness of how we can experience the time of our lives...
Our relationship to time has become corrupted exactly because we allow ourselves very little experience of the timeless. We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief . . . We speak of stealing time as if it no longer belonged to us. We speak of needing time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to make time for ourselves as if it were in our power to do so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient and present.
-David Whyte, from Crossing the Unknown Sea
Attention
Patience
Presence
Could it be that these are the ingredients for living a life filled with a spaciousness, a connection, a depth, a breadth and an appreciation for all the time we truly have?
Could it be that revelling in any brief moments of stillness - rather than filling every moment to the brim with movement, sound and colour - could it be that the stillness might bring us back to feeling that the days are as long and timeless as those dreamy summer afternoons of being a child. A child with a whole day in front of him or her, and no plans but to play?
Note to Self: Add some Stillness to the Time Budget and see what might happen.
Beautiful. I think I need to staple this to my forehead.
Posted by: Swirly | June 13, 2009 at 03:42 PM