August: Time & Timelessness

The soul has one foot in time
and one foot in eternity.

—Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul

I’ve always been fascinated by time. 

As a child, I would sit and watch the second hand slowly float in its endless circle, around and around the face of the clock hanging on the wall of our living room. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, my family moved around a lot when I was growing up, so although the walls around me were constantly changing, many of the things hanging on those walls were the same. One such item was a clock, which moved along with me between the fourteen houses of my childhood and adolescence. It depicted a kitten, gray and fluffy, fast asleep in a flower pot, with the following words inscribed next to it: 

When you are at peace with yourself, 
any place is home.

As I would sit and watch the hands of the clock move around the sleeping kitten and her temporary home, I was fascinated by the idea of time, something that we can’t perceive with any of the senses. Like air, we can’t see it or touch it, but it plays an incredibly important role in our lives, holding everything together. I found it funny that time itself could not be perceived but only measured by devices such as this.

I would wonder about how we couldn’t seem to get out of the collective agreement of time. I wondered when time started and if it would ever end. My favorite movies, like The Wizard of Oz and The Neverending Story, played with the concept of time. I was fascinated by the idea of time travel and loved stories like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.

As a young adult, I lost my childhood fascination with time and began to regard it, as Anne Lamott writes about in Bird by Bird, as a kind of bully, pushing me around in the form of alarm clocks and to-do lists. I was never so anxious as in my undergraduate years, compulsively overachieving, the perfectionistic part of myself breathing down my neck, alarm clock and to-do list ever in hand. The idea of sitting and literally watching the minutes tick by, as I did in childhood, would have seemed absurd to me.

Now, at the ripe old age of 47, and in that precarious phase known as midlife, I have returned to my childhood fascination with time. I still have moments of slipping into an old pattern with time, where it feels like a bit of a bully, but I also have come to see time as a sort of mysterious teacher, an inescapable part of this human experience, much like death. I’ve also returned to favoring art that plays around with time. A few of my favorite movies that bend linear time are Interstellar, Arrival, and Cloud Atlas.

One concept that has helped me to appreciate the elusive nature of time is timelessness.

What do I mean by timelessness? I’ll start by telling you what I don’t mean. I’m not referring to a Swarovski watch or Coco Chanel in a black dress—items or looks that never go out of style. I mean timelessness more in the spiritual or philosophical sense.

As a therapist and someone interested in spiritual concepts that help us live more meaningful lives, timelessness has been extremely important and healing both for me, personally, and also for many of the clients I work with in my private practice. Below, I offer a few therapeutic practices for working with time in a more spiritual way in order to help reduce anxiety, heal from the past, process grief, and gain encouragement for the future.

The first practice is something I call Making Friends with Time. First, notice what kind of relationship you have with time. If you’ve given it human traits, most likely they aren’t positive ones. Do you find time annoying or anxiety-inducing? Instead, we can regard time like any other inevitable aspect of our human existence. Like the ocean, we can see that it’s just there, doing its thing. We can have feelings about it, but that won’t change what it does or diminish its power. Instead of taking it personally, we can just make peace with it, remembering that the passage of time is completely out of our control and impersonal. If I can learn to regard it with a sense of pleasant neutrality or friendliness, that will only benefit my nervous system. Sitting in the airport while my flight keeps getting delayed . . . waiting at the train tracks when I’m running late for an appointment—these are great moments to make friends with time.

Another concept I love is Whole Time (also called Circular Time.) Whole time operates differently than linear time, in which we only move in one direction (forward). Whereas linear time, as the name implies, operates in a rigid way along a straight line, whole time is shaped like a circle.

I think this is what Thomas Moore is referring to when he says that human beings operate horizontally and vertically. In the horizontal aspect of experience, he says, are all of the ways in which we are bound to the physical realm. Horizontally, we are anchored in the material world and are subject to the laws of gravity and linear time, which marches only forward. But vertically, we gain access to the non-material, through our minds and souls. Here, in the vertical aspect of experience via dreams, imagination, and meditation, we access time in its circular, non-linear state. This allows us the freedom to move backward or forward for healing and encouragement.

One whole-time practice I love to do in therapy is Connecting to the Child Self. There are so many ways of creating a secure relationship between the adult self and child self, and this is one of my favorites. It’s a more productive way of revisiting a painful memory from the past—not just ruminating but offering yourself something different and healing. Think of a time from childhood in which you were struggling with something and really needed a warm, compassionate adult to come and sit next to you. What would have helped? Some kind words? A hug? Something else? Then, in meditation, journey back in time to where your child self is and offer them exactly what they needed. This process is sometimes called internal re-parenting—showing up for your younger self to heal the wounds of the past. Neuroscientist Deb Dana has shown that we can literally change painful memories through this process. 

Another of my favorite whole-time practices is Connecting to the Future Self. Think of something you are currently struggling with. Now, close your eyes and imagine your future self has traveled back in time and is sitting next to you. They’re here to support you and help you through this time. What guidance or perspective might they offer that’s only available through the wisdom of hindsight? How might they comfort or encourage you?

Finally, I’d like to put the concept of flow state on your radar. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a phrase coined in the 1970s by Hungarian-American Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. From football to painting, flow state is characterized by a full immersion and absorption in an activity and a loss of a sense of time. It is also positively correlated with higher happiness levels. In other words, people who get into a flow state more regularly report higher happiness levels. What are some activities in which you experience flow? Can you make more time for those activities in your life?

In coming to a close with this writing, I want to thank you for spending your time with me here. I know time is a precious resource that is limited for all of us, and I hope the ideas and practices I shared in this post will be helpful to you in some way. 

I look forward to seeing you back here in September, when I’ll be writing about some of my favorite aspects of the Enneagram.