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Turn back the clock--time! Is it all in the mind?
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Daylight Savings Time once again comes to an end. It’s time to turn back the clock—literally—turn it back one hour. What if we turned back the clock every Saturday night for four consecutive weeks? What time would the sun rise or set a month from now”? Would we have more or less time? 
I don’t know who first said it but I have heard that “the alarm clock is a device that makes you rise and whine.”
True confession: As a minister who works on Sunday the “fall back” one hour every year is my favorite Saturday/Sunday combination. I hate it when we “spring forward” and lose an hour.
Here is the problem. Turning back the clock only gives me an extra hour on Sunday morning if I pretend the time hasn’t really changed. Because of my job, I usually get up around 6 am on Sunday morning. If I don’t turn back the clock it looks like 6 but it’s really 5.
Whether we turn the clock ahead or back, it’s always the same time—and for most of us it seems there isn’t enough of it.
While driving down the street I counted 7 people talking on their cell phones—this was in the span of two blocks. I remembered some 10-12 years ago that all those people would have had to find a pay phone or wait until they got home if they wanted to call someone. That was okay then, but now, expectations have changed.
It’s ironic. Faster and more efficient technological devices promise to save us time—but everyone I know feels like they have less time.
Did ancient people also feel that time was a thief? No doubt--although probably not in the same way. For the ancients time was circular and cyclical.
We mostly understand it as linear. Time understood as returning in cycles and seasons is abundant. Time that hurries ahead is time that runs out.
For most of us, time is a bandit. And this perception is undeniably compounded by an increasingly frantic pace of life.
When I was a teenager my mother put up a refrigerator magnet that said, “the hurrieder I go, the behinder I get”. It seems that this modern age nudges us to hurry up. But as many of us experience, the more we hurry up, the less time we seem to have.
The less time we think we have, the more impatient we become.
When we are impatient, the world around us becomes a source of frustration. Feeling impatient is a symptom of self absorption.
We have all been in situations when our expectations about what was supposed to happen didn’t pan out. We all know what it’s like to erupt in frustration when events turn against us. We all know what it’s like for our minds to scream at us that it shouldn’t be this way. When things go haywire or we are falling behind impatience invades the mind.
But when the mind slows down, there is space and spaciousness. When there is spacioiusness within us we have the capacity for making room for others and other thoughts. When the mind slows down we become patient—when the mind is quiet, panic dissolves. And when we are less in a panic, less in a hurry, we see that life is not all about me. Learning patience is the process of quieting the mind.
The Indian mystic Meher Baba put it like this: “A mind that is fast is sick. A mind that is slow is sound. A mind that is still, is divine.”
Slow down the mind.
There are at least two ways to learn patience by slowing down the mind.
The first is to become aware of what our minds are doing. Simple awareness of what the mind is chattering helps us to detach from the chatter. When the mind says--'worry about this, worry about that--hurry up, you're going to be late'!--don't let the mind push you around. Just being aware of what the mind is doing helps to disarm it of its tyranny.
The second thing is to practice patience by sitting in meditation every day.
Over time, meditation trains the mind to be quiet. By the silent mental repetition or a mantra, the mind becomes absorbed in one thing rather than everything all at once. As long as the fluttering mind is in motion, it is creating a commotion for us. As long as the fluttering mind is in motion it is pushing us to think thoughts, chatter internally, make judgments, keep things moving. Meditation teaches the mind to be patient.
The more we are patient, the less we suffer.
The purpose of spirituality is to give us tools that will reduce our suffering and the suffering of those with whom we interact. A basic spiritual truth is that the more self absorbed I am, the more I suffer and the more I suffer the more suffering I create for others.
His Holiness, the Dalai Lama once said, “the moment you think only of yourself, the focus of your whole reality narrows, and because of this narrow focus, uncomfortable things can appear huge and bring you fear and discomfort and a sense of feeling overwhelmed by misery. But the moment you think of others with a sense of caring, however, your view widens. Within that wider perspective, your own problems appear to be of little significance, and this makes a big difference.”
Practice patience not only because it reduces our suffering but because it also reduces the suffering of those around us.
Patience and compassion are inextricably bound up together. It is only when I settle down that I develop the capacity for compassion and love. Compassion and love are two sides of the same coin. Compassion is the wish for other beings to be free from suffering. Love wants other beings to have happiness.
Compassion and love grow naturally out of the mind that is spacious and slow. This is why lately, I’ve been repeating the mantra: don’t hurry, be happy.
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