I lost track of the time. Where did the time go? How often
have you heard someone make this comment? Generally, it means we were so
engrossed with what we were doing that we forgot we had another appointment or
schedule. When we lose track of time,
time no longer seems to exist. It is not moving fast or slow, it just does not
seem to matter to us. I heard someone say recently that they did not wake up
and say “gee, I have to go to work today.” Instead, they woke up and said “Wow,
I get to go to work again today.” Can you imagine the difference between time
for the first case and time for the second? Time in the first case is drudgery
and time in the second is a joy.
When you do not enjoy what you are doing, time is the most
oppressive. You check the clock. You wonder when the time will go by. You find
ways to “break” up your time. The more “breaks” the better. When you enjoy or even love what you are
doing, you forget the clock. You don’t
worry about breaks or when it is time to go home. Sean John’s says “life without passion is
unforgiveable.” He lives this in his
daily life. His message is important for
all of us. How many of us find lives
that are full of passion? Why not? Is such a life beyond our reaches or do we
just fail to make the choice?
The more our world is dominated by time, by pressures to do
things faster, to multi-task, or to live in the fast lane, the less happy and
more stressed we will be. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if time did not matter
anymore and we could lose track of time on a permanent basis? What if our lives
were so filled with passion that every second was one we could live with for
eternity? What if we counted Passion instead of minutes?
When was the last time you lost track of time? Can you
hardly wait to go to work today or do you count each workday between Sunday and
Friday? Is your life filled with passion or wondering when the minute hand will
move forward? Are you in the “Thank God it’s
Friday” camp or in the “I am looking forward to Monday” camp.
Psychiatrists measure someone's contact with reality by their ability to say where and when they are. So, if you lose track of where you are in time, you have lost your mind (if the psychiatric standard is right, which I doubt).
ReplyDeleteCould we have a life dominated by passion? I'm afraid that we can't, because we have this damnable power to get used to things. That power saves us from being oppressed by bad circumstances that we can't get away from (which are all too frequent), but at the cost of "saving" us from protracted joy at good fortune. Imagine that I had a house filled with paintings I acquired because they struck me as transcendently beautiful. After a brief while, I would walk through my rooms and barely notice the paintings. If I had a long string of successes, the thrill of succeeding would wear off. Any particular object of passion dulls with time. In a series of passionate engagements, each new one may well give a lesser kick than the earlier ones. In other words, passion is like an addictive drug. It requires higher and higher doses to get the same psychological payoff. Maybe the better life is a mixture of successes and failures, periods of passionate involvement interspersed with disengagement or boredom.
A life with passion then would have to be a life not lived in the future but in the moment. Each moment would bring exquisite joy if we did not have the past and future to compare it with. I think that is why the Guru's all say that true joy can only be experienced by living in the present. You would never be acclimated or bored if you were living moment to moment.
ReplyDeleteWhat you say would only be true if the default state were joy. It may be so. Hinduism describes ultimate reality as Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Being-Consciousness-Bliss. On the Hindu view, if you take away all the clutter and distraction, you uncover a base of pure joy. Buddhism, on the other hand, claims that there is an inherently painful quality to existence (at least to ordinary, pre-enlightenment, existence). If we really can get caught up in the moment, momentarily forgetting the past and the future, then do we exist at all? Not if we are inherently temporally extended beings. But I'm not sure if we are such beings. If we can be completely within the moment, then whether we are joyous, bored, or in pain would depend on what is happening at that moment.
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