I don't experience time the way you probably do.
Many people take that to mean something about the relativity of time as one gets older. To me, a year represents only 1/70th of my life, while to, say, my grandson-in-law, it represents 1/5th. A year is an eternity to him; it's but a blink of the eye to me.
But that's not what I'm talking about. Most people believe that time moves at a steady rate - we advance into the future at a constant clip of one second per second, and it's always that way. Scientific observations and theory depend on this common-sense assumption. Most people would agree that sometimes time feels like it's moving slower or faster - slower if you're anticipating something, faster if you're enjoying something and not paying attention to the clock. But those, it's argued, are just psychological perceptions of time. It's still moving along a steady 1 sec/sec regardless of whether we feel like it's going fast or slow.
I believe time really does go slower when it's experienced that way, and faster when that seems to be the case. While most people feel as if they're floating down a metaphorical river of time - carried by the constant, ever-present, and inescapable currents of time - I feel that time is just in our mind and is being carried along by us. We are not traveling through time; time is quite literally controlled by our perception of it.
It's one thing to accept that statement as a philosophical precept and another to actually experience it, just like it's one thing to believe in an afterlife but another to live eternally. But that's where the practice of meditation comes in.
My practice recently has been to sit for 90 minutes every other day (I take my walking hikes on the days in between). While I sit, time sometimes goes very, even excruciatingly, slow. When, oh when, is that timer finally going to ring? It seems like it's been forever.
But when the 90 minutes finally is over, it's as if no time had passed at all. Nothing happened during those 90 minutes - I didn't do anything and the world didn't present itself to me in any narrative form. Just sitting there, one can't compose a "and then that next thing happened" story. I sit down, nothing happens, and then the bell rings, I get up, and the world (and time) resumes. 1:30 pm becomes 3:00 just as suddenly as if I merely turned the clock forward.
Time was simultaneously moving very, very slow, and also flash-forwarding by an hour and a half. Two conflicting impressions present themselves to me at the same time. The only way to reconcile the paradox is to accept that time isn't linear, it's what you perceive it to be.
Several years ago, I was stageside at the Doug Fir Lounge in Portland, Oregon, waiting for Spencer Krug's band, Moonface, to perform. Near me, an intense-looking young man with wild hair was furiously scribbling some sort of notes into a pad. It appeared like he was having such intense insights and revelations, he could barely keep up with himself and was frantically trying to record as much as he could. He might have been having a breakdown or psychotic episode for all I knew, or he might have been in the throes of sudden enlightenment.
I decided to mess with him and tell him something "profound" to see how'd he'd react. Not coming up with anything deeper to say, I told him, "We aren't in time, time is in us."
It worked and he took the bait. "Holy shit, you're right," he said, and began scribbling some more in his notepad. While this was happening, Krug himself was on stage but a few feet away putting the finishing touches on his equipment setup before his show. He noticed the intense young man's reaction, and asked him what I had just told him.
"We aren't in time, time is in us," the young man told Krug.
And I'll never forget the words that Krug said in response to this. Spenser Krug, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and frontman of the band Moonface (and member of other bands as well), looked at me and said one simple word:
"Whatever."
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