Passing time

Passing Time By Maya Angelou

“Your skin like dawn 

Mine like musk 

One paints the beginning 

Of a certain end. 

The other, the end of a 

Sure beginning.” 

Time. It’s so hard to give. 

Society is so diseased around time. Got to get more done. Check this off the list, catch the plane. We don’t have time. In a capitalist society, money is linked to time, “time is money”, and yet time is the secret ingredient.  

To call someone, to express appreciation, to listen more closely, all of these things require time.  

And for every moment of our separation from time the body suffers, the spirit shivers and dims, our well-being is compromised.  

Time. 

And we wonder why we struggle to weather the difficult moments. Whole industries have arisen around this phenomenon, papering over the cracks, and worse. Doing everything they can to exploit and manipulate our separation from time, ourselves and each other. And we all continue to play along. Inner anxiety being dragged along by the collective wave of non-looking. If you can’t beat them, then join them. 

We can build stronger foundations and with it more connectedness. Resistant while compassionate to this collective hysteria. 

So can you find that place of utter wonder? The one that is teaching us all to slow down. Where we realise that me not being in charge of my time is such a healing thing. To go at someone else’s pace is miraculously a gift to myself. To step into this wellspring, I learn so much. I learn that I have to let go of control. And in letting go the eternal presents itself in all its intoxicating shimmering wonder. 

So let friendship be the motivation. 

Friendship is a place where we can resist the slide into mechanised inhabiting of the world, and find more time, pause, rest, space. Friendship is non-transactional, what we receive is the relationship.  

And that takes time. And that takes practice and letting go. 

When we pay full attention to others, when we put down our agendas, what fills that space is a sense of connectedness. And it serves all.  

 
So be friends with the time of the trees, the animals, and of other people. 

Those unwavering foundations and friendships are there for all if we create a new relationship with time. 

—
Andrew.