Nothing could happen and nothing could be remembered in our lives were it not for that strange multi-dimensional, multi-level quality we reduce to calling time: not the functioning of a single human cell, the vast weather systems passing through our skies nor the surrounding cosmos of our planetary systems.
Time
is on our side, time is not our enemy, time is our greatest friend. If we can come to know time in its own intimate, unfolding way and not through the abstract measure we have made of it, time starts to grant a greater, more spacious, more elemental and even eternal freedom to every mortal, seemingly time-bound human life.
Time is not slipping through our fingers, time is here forever, it is we who are slipping through the fingers of time. Memory and the traces of memory grant me a sense of time passing and also enable me to learn. How I remember through time and how I learn and how I put those memories and that learning into conversation with the future shapes my identity for good or for ill.
Time is at the centre of my identity. Time only seems to be something in which I participate involuntarily, but time needs me voluntarily to deepen my understanding of its multivalent nature and help to mediate its life fully in my world. Time needs me: needs me to live through all its many appearances, to give it life and amplitude. Time exists in a field of possibility which I influence and partly determine. I may constantly cry that I need more time, but actually time needs more of me - more of our spacious, uninterrupted timeless time to live out and understand both its extraordinary depths and its incalculable far off horizons.
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