Making Time for Excuses
We give Old Father Time a bit of a hard time. We blame him constantly.
“There are not enough hours in the day.”
“Where did the time go?”
“I would write that book if only I had the time.”
“Time just gets away from me.”
This really unfair on him. He gives us continuity. He allows us to have memories of the past and to dream about the future. He stops everything from happening all at once, which would be ever so confusing for us.
It is humankind, not him, who have enslaved themselves to time. If you wear a watch, you are entrapping yourself ‘in time’. Watch that clock and again, you bond yourself to time. Even our calendar imprisons us in unnatural time. Months of varying lengths are a man-made construct. September, October, November and December should, by rights, be the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months of the year. We have the egos of Julius (July) and Augustus (August) Caesar to thank for that anomaly.
Incidentally, we have a perfectly good clock which orbits the Earth 13 times very year with the cosmic precision. When you live your life by 13 Moon Time, I can testify personally you stop pushing water uphill.
Time is not external and imposed upon us. It is generated by our consciousness. If we want to change our interaction with it, all we have to do is change how and what we think. For example, if you fret over past events or worry about the future, you have taken your focus away from what you are working on right now. You will ‘lose’ and waste time.
Old Father Time has become a bit of a punch bag who never complains. He just keeps marching along silently, probably smiling at our naivety at the way we have allowed ourselves to be entrapped by time.
Just imagine though if we could expand time such that we could get everything we wanted done and more. We would have no excuses and nobody to blame. All of a sudden we would be completely accountable for our actions and deeds. This would have massive implications. Time wasters would have nowhere to hide and those that are productive would get even more done.
In just 35 short years, Mozart composed over 600 works, many praised as masterpieces. Bearing in mind he started around the age of 5, that’s 30 or so compositions a year. Now he had no Internet, TV or computer games to consume his time, but that is pretty amazing output by any standards.
It’s said, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. Why this works is that busy people, like Mozart are not frittering time away on other things, they are focussed on getting things done.
For many people, having an external clock superimposed upon them is the most brilliant excuse. The reality is this however. We can all choose to to run our consciousness at a different rate and to get more done in less time. When we do this in a team or group, time dilation effects multiply.
If you sit in your left brain, with your ‘inner devil’ focussed on detail, you get nothing done. When you live a right brained existence with your head in the clouds, nothing gets done either. However, when both brain hemispheres work in harmony, our efficiency increases by 400% or so.
What’s even more amazing about achieving such efficiency gains is that the techniques required are largely free. They involve breathing and learning to get in the zone by entering the meditative state with our eyes open. These techniques also have health benefits by reducing stress and even lowering blood pressure. It’s thought that every minute spent in the meditative state adds at least a minute to our life spans.
So just imagine what you might do and what you might achieve if you no longer had the excuse that there was not enough time. There’s no time like the present to find out.