If you’re anything like me, which is to say if you are human, it is likely that your concern with time is constant. I often catch myself saying things like, “I don’t have enough time,” “So much to do, but so little time,” and “I never have enough free time.” While you may think about time a lot, have you ever given thought to the concept of time?

Some of my biggest gripes in life are because of time. I never seem to have enough time to accomplish all the things I want to. In my mind, I plan for the future regularly, creating stress over things that haven’t happened yet. Ultimately, this robs me of enjoying and fully embracing the present moment. I am guilty of  overbooking and over-committing at times in the past, probably because I was overly optimistic about the amount of time I had available to me. From time to time, I am late to meetings. Admittedly, I am not great at keeping a calendar, but should I have to live my life tethered to a planner or calendar just to maintain my sanity?

How often have you noticed yourself thinking the way I have described? How often do you ask: “What time is it?” What are you missing out on by living this way? So much stress in human life comes from the concept of time and people’s relationship to it. Unfortunately, time is so embedded in the human psyche and collective understanding of the world. Our schedules, our holidays, our travel plans, our banking systems, our histories⎯our entire lives⎯function around a collective understanding of time. For many people, stress, frustration, and unhappiness is a natural result from an overconcern with time.

In The Antiquary (1816) Sir Walter Scott wrote: “Time and tide tarry for no man.” Charles Dickens echoed this sentiment in his 1884 Martin Chuzzlewit: “Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage, but all men do have to wait for time and tide.”

If you think about the eternity of time, time stops for no one and yet people are constantly waiting for time. Is it time to go to work? Is it time to find a job? When will I find the love of my life? When will I find happiness? All of these questions point to examples of how humans wait for time. When we want for things that we don’t have or fret over the future, we wait for a time that doesn’t yet exist. In reality, we wait for time that doesn’t ever exist.

But without time, how would our world function? Without time, what would we have? What we would have is the present moment. We would only have our lived moments: The Now. If you’re in the present moment, —The Now—you will no longer be a slave to time. You will just Be. You want for nothing when you are just being. There is nothing to wait for when you are just being. Your reality shifts when you are just Be-ing in the The Now.

Time, as a concept only exists in the minds of humans. Time doesn’t actually exist. It has no form. There are just movements of the eternal⎯things that happen in between space. The ebbs and flows of life continue perpetually. Tides change. The earth spins on its axis. Weather happens. Human life is just a speck of eternity and thus, we chunk out the pieces of our existence into a concept we call time. But time doesn’t exist naturally. Sure, it serves a vital organizational purpose for human existence but essentially, it doesn’t exist as a form. It is formless, nameless, and doesn’t exist. 

So how do humans transcend time? Perhaps, only through our minds. This is the space after all, where time is created and maintained. Therefore, this is the same space in which to transcend it. Time is a human concept. We can just as easily forget it. Or neglect to give it attention.

Consider, if you stopped thinking about time, would it still exist in reality? Flowers don’t experience time. A flower just is. It just lives in the present moment. For a flower, there is no consideration of linear time⎯past, present, future. Its existence is just a perpetual state of being in the present moment. And because it doesn’t live in a state of linear time, it doesn’t have the stress and concerns that humans have. It just is. 

Imagine the Earth devoid of human life, inhabited only by plants and animals. Would it still have a past and a future? Could we still speak of time in any meaningful way? The question “What time is it?” or “What’s the date today?” ⎯if anybody where there to ask it⎯would be quite meaningless. The oak tree or the eagle would be bemused by such a question. “What time?” they would ask. “Well, of course, it’s now. The time is now. What else is there?”

 -The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1999), Eckhart Tolle, p. 34

Have you ever noticed for yourself, in moments when you are truly present, you often lose track of time? In joyful moments with family members, in intimate moments with lovers, in moments of adventure and in countless other instances when you are fully present in what you are doing (some speak of this as a state of flow), time seems to fall away. Perhaps if we can transcend time, even but for a moment, we will become present to our lives unfolding before us. We might even begin to understand our timeless nature⎯our nature as part of the Greater Eternal⎯which is to say, the greater present moment.

I am not suggesting here that we throw out our clocks and ignore our commitments because “time doesn’t exist.” What I am saying is that because it does not exist in form, we should only give it the attention it needs to function in our world. And when you don’t need it for practical reasons, don’t concern yourself over it. And in everything you do, bring yourself to the present moment, to The Now. The time spent in this space will connect you more meaningfully to your life and very likely connect you to something greater.

Perhaps I should stop telling myself: “I don’t have enough time.” How could I ever if it doesn’t exist?

With love,
Cam

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