Mitigating the Tyranny of Time

“When were you the happiest?”

“High school.”

My husband, a therapist, declares his patients invariably answered his question , “What’s the happiest time in your life?” with those two words. For over twenty years, he counseled former combat veterans. That’s a lot of people whose happiest years were decades earler. Yet when he told me this I was unsurprised, because I thought of my two older sisters. I was certain that’s exactly how they’d answer John’s question.

So am I proposing some kind of psychological time machine back to high school in mitigating the tyranny of time?

Nope, my years in high school were nothing like that of my popular cheerleader older sisters–I was anonymous. But watching their preoccupation with boys, clothes, dating, followed closely by early and miserable marriages, readied me for learning the key to happiness from John Bradshaw. Bradshaw had left Catholicism right before he was to be ordained to the priesthood. The future “founder of the self-help movement” taught at a private Dominican college in Houston where he used us to recover his life and sobriety.

Over and over, pacing the classroom floor, Bradshaw shouted, “If you want to be happy, then act as if you are, take time to …LOOK at that tree!”

Over time, the feeling will follow, the knowledge that “Yes!, I am happy!”

Exactly like faith and love: The actions precede the feelings.

Is it really tyranny?

Time is certainly tyranny for those lost in long ago illusions of high school perfection. And those who live in the future: “When I finish this degree…” “All will be perfect when I get that new house…” It’s tyranny too for those who spend their lives racing against the clock.

My recently learned tricks aren’t really steps in mitigating the tryanny of time but more like a conscious decision to stop fighting it. My recent accident happened because my mind devolved to my early training in crisis. Those years were indeed filled with crisis, other lives were on the line and instilled powerful reactions in me. That the panic reaction is completely unwarranted doesn’t matter. Because I was very late, my mind focused only on that clock.

The catalyst for my “Aha!” is Meister Eckhart and his trenchant remarks on time.

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart lived in the thirteenth century. The mechanical clock had just been created. Our notions of hours, minutes and seconds didn’t exist. Hence precise meeting times lacked any semblance to our preoccupation the construct of time. And yet, one of the great philosophers of that age declared “the very taint and smell of time” keeps the light from reaching us.

So exactly what is it I’m suggesting?

Don’t look.

Huh?

Now, when I get in my car to attend Mass, a meeting, appointment, gathering or the like, once driving, I refuse to look at the time. Confident I’ve done my part in reaching my destination, read, left early enough.

I force my attention solely on prayer aand what’s happening around me, other cars, drivers, and the like. Only when reaching my destination do I look at the time. The habit bleeds over to other tasks druing my days causing sharper writing, cooking and deeper meditation. Obviously, there’s nothing new about this practice, all traditions preach and teach: live in the now, the present. And so mitigating the tyranny of time.

Just so,

My plan for Lent is to not overthink Lent. When I said that during confession last Thursday morning, I surprised myself. Suddenly unsure of what I meant, I stopped talking and regarded my confessor uncertainly..Thankfully, Father Charlie Banks nodded his understanding and said, “We keep trying to earn his love, his forgiveness.”

Precisely!

So what does “not overthinking Lent” mean, specifically?

Of course I’ll fast and study spiritual texts that await my attention. But I want to be less rigid about it. For example, if, on a usual fast day, it feels right to make us a meal, I’ll do it..aware these penances emanate from grace, not me. But far more than that, I want to make better use of my imagination.

If, like me, you believe–are certain, that Eden is real, I mean imagining Adam and Eve’s days. How they were with their Lord when they “walked with him at the breezy time of day.” They knew what they were: his beloved creatures. Therefore, they understood their absolute dependence on their Creator but also comprehended their glorious partnership with him in caring for his creation. So it didn’t feel like dependence but love.

Adam and Eve’s senses were uncorrupted. They viewed and heard the trees and the animals just like he did: with pure love. They’d no thought of the utility of a tree or animal, for all was one. Our first parents experienced sheer joy at their being along with that of all creation. They were children, Peguy’s magnificent epic poem, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope explains:

Children are not like adults.

For children playing, working, resting, stopping, running, it’s all one.

Together.

It’s the same.

They don’t make the distinction.

They’re happy.

They have fun all the time.

As much when they work as when they play.

They don’t notice it.

They’re very happy.

And their commandment is the same commandment of Jesus.

Of the child Jesus.

Hope, too, is she who is always playing.

They saw “with the inexpressible bliss of supreme life, which is supreme wakefulness, supreme activity,and supreme intensity, and at the same time deepest calm, deepest peace, and deepest security….”

Hanns Georg von Heintschell-Heinegg

Imagine!