Positive Reflections – At Peace With Time
To live in freedom you have to live at peace with time; live as a creator of time and not a slave of time. To live at peace with time is to live in harmony with nature. When you plant a sapling today, you cannot accelerate the process so that the next day you have a tree. When it is summer, you cannot make the earth revolve around the sun quicker or slower for winter to arrive before or later. Everything has its rhythm in nature. We have distanced ourselves from the natural rhythm and our accelerated mind exercises pressure, creates stress and causes anxiety. We plan the future, we are stuck in the past and the present escapes us.
Many worries have to do with how we live time: the past, the present and the future. Worrying about what might happen , when the moment has not yet come for it to happen, takes away from us the necessary energy to deal with it when it finally arrives. Living in memories drains our energy; the past already happened and no longer exists, except in our memory. We feed memories, not realizing that emerging the memory in our mind distracts us from the present and weakens us. We want to relive an experience that already happened, and in the end we feel disappointed, feeling a mental and emotional waste.
Not only is your strength reduced by the way that you live the past and project onto the future, but also how you live in this moment. When, for example, you oppose the present and have resistances, these consume your energy and cause you stress. If you accept the present you can flow flexibly without wasting your energy. Accepting does not mean feeling a victim of what is happening now. Accepting the present means stopping comparing yourself with others; you want what the other has, their money, their talents, their beauty, their personality, their achievements, their virtues, etc. So, instead of being grateful for what you have and accepting yourself as you are, you try to have and be like the other. In this way, you are never satisfied. The dissatisfaction causes you a constant unhappiness. The most important thing that you should do in this moment is to feel content.
In order to live true freedom of being, we have to make friends with time and stop living stressed in time. We have to trust. Trust that you will arrive on time, that you will do it on time and, if not, that a particular problem will be solved. Don’t let time be a stress factor. When we live stressed because of time, we lose the best of life. We stop living what is essential and important, and we get lost in the details: I have to go here, I have to finish this, I have to call up someone, and endless amounts of – I have to…s that consume our mental energy and make us get lost in the details of the trivial . As well, in hurrying, we lose quality.
You choose whether, each morning, you want to get up and begin with watching television, reading the newspaper over a cup of tea, or you want to get up and listen to peaceful music, read a couple of pages of spiritual book that inspire you and you begin the day with enthusiasm and by visualizing it positively: today will be a marvellous day, I shall enjoy it … True freedom lies in being content now. When you are content, enjoying yourself and having a good time, you don’t realize how time passes. This means that, if we lived in a state of constant happiness, we wouldn’t realize how time passes. Time would be at our service. We would be the rulers of time and not the other way round.
