Jesus Klingon
ezOP
Posts: 567
(3/27/06 6:48 pm)
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On the fleetingness of time.
Club Dahlia
Momibus
Ginger lemon
Posts: 156
(4/6/05 5:09): Last night Anna told me on the phone that she's intensely aware how quickly time moves, that it's moving faster as she gets older. I've been thinking about this a lot. Being on vacation gives me the opportunity to do a lot of things that change my usual perception of time. (Usually I think in 50 minute hours, the structure of class periods enforcing this; or I think of tasks to be done and gotten through, not usually savoured or enjoyed. Or I think of time in chunks like my commute: to be endured as a finite amount of unavoidable stress, but do-able: I forge a mental wall around me to prevent the stirring of the occasional terrifying bout of clastrophobia arising in unmoving traffic). Then in yoga class this morning, Roger Nolan gave us this sutra from Buddha. It seems apt for all of us struggling with the way time zaps us, saps us, dazzles and deprives us...
"Thus shall you think of all this fleeting world: A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."
This hit me quite cleanly in the solar plexus. Okay. So if we don't get bamboozled by thinking that time is supposed to be slow or fast, that memories are supposed to be, well, memorable, that life is supposed to be full of a certain kind of experience or of time -- if we're able to acknowledge the truth about the world -- then we're able to see more clearly. This in itself had the paradoxical effect of seeming to stop time: making the single moment of reflection hang memorably.
Now of course I'll soon forget I ever heard this, and so the next time Roger uses it in class, I'll be able to say "wow. That's so true. I'll have to remember that. "
Fin,
Jesus Klingon
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