unpressured time

We wear watches, hang clocks, and spend endless moments waiting.  I even carry my cell phone sometimes simply for its time-keeping ability.  Humans are inextricably linked to time.

What if we all took a step back for a moment, forgot about what was coming next, stopped making plans for tomorrow night and lived today, lived in the now as an endless moment -- unpressured time.

In his book, A Severe Mercy (also mentioned in an earlier post), Sheldon VanAuken writes of this very thing:

Time to sit on stone walls, time to see beauty... We had spoken of 'moments made eternity', meaning what are calling timeless moments moments precisely without the pressure of time -- moments that might be called, indeed, timeful moments.  Or time-free moments.  And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus -- the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end... Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus.  Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours:  perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little.  When we speak of Now, we seem to mean the timeless:  there is no duration.  Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils Now. (pp. 198-99)

Time itself does not pressure us, but our own awareness of it.  The mere awareness of an ending prevents us from enjoying the now.

Let us live in these timeless moments, to forget that each must end, and enjoy each one for what it is - a piece of who we are, a portion of our lives, something that shapes each of the following moments.