Time is Elastic

It bends with perception.

It can be twisted, restricted, withheld, wasted, treasured, reviled, revered– embraced. It can be measured with heartbeats, breaths, calendars, seasons and lives. It is curious, quixotic, confusing. It mystifies, bamboozles and trumpets.

It is a shape-shifter.

It is crocuses erupting through snow, the sonata of summer storms, the goodbye in every beginning.

Time is like taffy.

It can stretch beyond what seems possible. It creates a loophole in the fabric of not enough and offers eternity inside whatever pocket you give it.

Three hours become three weeks whenever I sink all the way into drawing with our sons, or having coffee with my husband, or running through the spring sun with the spirits of my mom and grandfather.

There are no limits. Not even the end of experience ends. It lingers long after like leftover taffy– tucked– into sweet beds of memory.

Presence.

This only happens for me when I am wholly present. No ulterior motive. No alternate agenda. No lurking fears, expectations, disappointments or anger. It must not exist at all or all be all out on the table.

AND, this is a big and, the same must be true for whomever I am with. Presence requires a certain kind of sacrifice of ego and grand plan. A kind of suspended magic. It is what it is. And it presents itself only if we are okay with the mystery and beauty of uncertainty.

It rewards coeur-age.

Time is like termites.

It eats away at the framework of our wellbeing with its insistence on death and sickness and the unbearable burden of all suffering.

It tears down our sense of safety and the security we work so hard to create. It destroys our external home. It claims what we think is ours. Reminds us we are all one.

It takes away what is outside to remind us it is also inside. It demands we begin again from this new point, no matter how wretched that might seem.

It will bring you to your knees.

Time is like a circus.

You can jump in and out of rings. Balance precariously from the high wire of risk and fall to the bouncy net of next steps.

You can swing from the trapeze of parties and weddings and births, do a triple summersault spiral of accomplishment, and land on the platform of solitude.

You can straddle the back of an enormous chance, stick you head in the mouth of true love and be shot out of a canon of rebirth.

It is a wild glorious adventure.

Time is like dreams.

In one of my top five favorite books, Einstein’s Dreams, author Alan Lightman, explores the elusive, elastic nature of time in thirty fables about people and places in which time behaves radically differently.

Each dream embodies one of the many possible natures of time.

Each vignette makes a profound social commentary on the way we live and the consequences of our choices. In one world, the faster you move, the more time you gain.

And since time is money, businesses fly about the town on wheels, powered by huge engines. The faster the workers move, the greater their productivity. But occasionally a worker will become overwhelmed by his perception that everyone is moving faster than he is.

When this happens, he will stop moving entirely. He will retire to his home, pull  the shades and live a simple, contented life with his family.

Time wakes us up.

It contracts and expands like an accordion of love.

No matter what pain we have endured, eventually time reintroduces itself, through the voice of love. It offers to break our hearts– open, again and again, if we choose love over fear.