Acrobatically Escaping Waiting
Dear old and new friends,
A lyric from a song of the British rock band Queen goes: “I want it all, I want it all, I want it all and I want it now.” It captures youth’s impatience and—whatever our age—our need for swiftness and no delay. We want the red light to turn green for us right now, our computer to instantly turn on or our headache to go away the split second after we take a pill. Red light runners and those who elbow ahead of you in the grocery store lane all want it—now! People can’t wait until after they have died, they want to know what happens after they die—now. These are only a few of literally hundreds of irritations we experience when made to wait.
Compulsory waiting is a more excruciating torture than any ever used by the Spanish Inquisition. Yet being disturbed when made to wait is like being irritated by a mirage since an unreal illusion is the cause of your suffering. Liberation from thinking that you can own time is the beginning of being patient, along with the question, when forced to wait for anything or on anyone, whose time is being wasted? Logically your answer would be mine!
Danger/Beware: that innocent personal pronoun is as dangerous as an IED (improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb, that detonates upon contact)! “My or mine” are claims of possession that aren’t real when attached to what can’t actually be owned—health or time. Whenever anything labeled “mine” is threatened or taken away, you can explode like an IED in anger or irritation. Timepieces shouldn’t enslave you since they’re only artificial and arbitrary measurements of eternity. And eternity isn’t endless, future time, it’s no time!
Liberation begins with the conviction that you can’t own time, and then by striving to “consciously” live in a new dimension—eternity. The hourglass of eternity is empty; it’s a timepiece with the blank face of no-time which means you’re free, never late or too early! I guarantee you if each time you look at any clock or your wristwatch and you see eternity, it will radically transform you and how you respond to life’s rollercoaster, unexpected, abrupt and frightening ups and downs.
Next Wednesday begins Lent. Resolving to be more patient and view time differently can be a great Lenten work! “What?” scream old-timer Catholics. “Lent should be penitential!” Don’t worry; it will be since this Lenten resolution will demand you live by clock time even as you try also to live in eternity.
Acrobatically walking that razor’s edge, simultaneously balancing time and no time, will either drive you crazy—or make you a saint!
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