Saving Time

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There's a story about a publishing firm that needed to get out of debt, so the president started a competition. She announced a bonus of $1,000 to anyone who could come up with a simple and airtight way to save the firm money. Suggestions could be left covertly with her, so no one had to know who was suggesting what (just in case the proposal involved cutting someone's paycheck). It wasn't long before one young employee left a suggestion with the president, handwritten on folded piece of paper. Once the employee had left her office, the president peeled open the paper and read what was written inside. It was certainly simple—just three words—and definitely airtight. It said: "Eliminate the bonus."

Doesn't it feel like that's the case with a lot of things, where the solution is a symptom of the problem itself? For a more serious example, take time. There appears to be an entire industry around time-saving hacks, with entrepreneurs, life coaches and consultants offering advice on how you can shave a few minutes off your day, which will add up to hours saved each week.

Interestingly, the advice often boils down to some variation on the following: make and keep a schedule; set up a task now so it's easier later; repurpose things for double duty; delegate tasks; and know when to take a break. What's downplayed is the time needed to establish those things: outlining the schedule; the energy put into setting up a task in advance; figuring out what can and can't be repurposed; managing the people you've delegated tasks to; and the effort needed to both take the break instead of powering through a task when we're "so close" to finishing it, as well as getting back to work when the break is over. What might be worse is that the advice never really changes, but our desire to hear it remains. Ultimately, one way to save time might be to stop sinking hours into getting advice about how to do it, and instead spend one's day doing something more practical or fulfilling.

It's not that the advice is bad—it's intuitive, verifiable and reproducible. With practice, all the suggestions can help us keep focus, feel confident and save a little time. It's just that we can get so caught up fretting about time that we lose track of how much of it has passed. But that is the nature of time itself. Time's march doesn't care how we spend it.

Time moves fast because it must encompass everything in the world that has been and will be. Time has much ground to cover, and our desires have little impact on its mission. That knowledge is nothing new; one of the most famous passages from the book of Ecclesiastes reminds of us how widely time spans: from plantings to harvests, from joy to sorrow, from silence to sound.

However, our relationship to time is not as unflinching as time itself. Time works in tandem with space to cover the totality of physical existence, but spirituality gives us tools to transcend that. For example, meditation changes one's perception of time, causing the subjective experience of moments to pass slower, richer and more meaningfully than time untempered by spiritual practice. That demonstrates how developing our transcendent selves helps us rise above the apparent shackles of time and space.

When we live spiritually, we realize that time does not control us. Even if it seems to go fast, we can slow it down through greater attention to spiritual purpose. Meditation, prayer, contemplation, all those are methods that help us organize our lives around what truly matters. Our bodies relax, our minds refocus and our spirits find higher destiny. Further, we decide what to do with our time. We are not beholden to purely physical demands. We pause to appreciate the abstract beauty of the world, or to extend beyond ourselves through actions of understanding and compassion. Spirituality changes our focus for the better. What we do matters. It has a positive impact on the world, and it drives us forward in personal evolution.

To return to Ecclesiastes, we should live our lives to their fullest, taking our entire being and potential into account - to appreciate time in body, mind and soul, to spend time developing and mastering our whole selves. Such action has constructive consequences. Whatever we enact in creation, the bread we throw upon the water, is returned to us in full and more. To be compassionate is to receive kindness. To look more is to see more. To pause is to appreciate life for its bounty, to appreciate ourselves for our possibility and completeness.

Don't get distracted so much by saving time, hoarding it up like a treasure, that you neglect to spend it; that's no better than worrying about time, obsessing over or dreading its passing. As the author of Ecclesiastes noted, the person so caught up in observing the wind and the clouds will never reap or sow. The best use of time is to use it - to unfold, to expand, to transcend, to become.

Let us pray:

Dear God,
Thank You for the gifts of time and experience.
May we embrace life,
May we expand in consciousness, understanding and creativity,
May we quicken in spirit,
And realize the beauty and perfection of our souls.
Help us to use time to its fullest,
To find our truest selves
In Your Eternal Light.
Amen.

"The virtues of life are your heavenly treasure, human character and the rays of your personality. The virtues of life are waiting for you to express and enjoy them as your nature, attributes and ideal. Through every vibration, through every ray of light, the virtues of life are calling your name. Because you are the living replica of the Spirit of Eternity, the truth, beauty and happiness of living are made your own inevitable experiences. Truth, beauty and happiness are awaiting your decision and command. Live the life, speak the word, and enjoy the kingdom of God." - Hanna Jacob Doumette, "Psalms For Today"

Time Is Not Territory

We've probably gotten used to it this year, so I think it's time to ask: What is the deal with daylight savings time? Why do we do it? Or maybe I should ask, why do we do it to ourselves? Who decided that we should get used to waking up at one hour, and then change it all up? And who had the audacity to suggest we should repeat it every six months?

The publicity behind the whole thing is that we get an extra hour of daylight as we head into spring, which is good for people who work the regular nine-to-five and—allegedly—it gives farmers an extra hour of sunshine with which to make hay. We spring ahead, we push four o'clock into five o'clock, and it appears as if we have a new hour of sunlight, as clean as virgin soil, waiting for us at the end of the day.

But with saying that, I think I've found a hole in the concept. If I understand things properly, the days already get longer as we slide into summer, so this seems less like an effort at improving our circumstances and more like an effort at fixing nature.

If we actually wanted to help ourselves, we should probably do something like spring ahead every year without falling back at all. That way, we'd extend the day over and over again, perhaps canceling out the next leap year in the process. Maybe the math wouldn't work out, but at least we'd feel like we were getting somewhere, rather than all this step-forward-step-backward stuff.

This year, daylight savings time coincided with the beginning of Lent, the season of the Christian calendar that leads us toward the Passion and all the stories that go with it. They're like fables or fairy tales when you think about them: the ride into Jerusalem on a donkey; the burst of anger in the Temple; the ear of an assailant miraculously healed in the Garden of Gethsemane; the pageantry of the Crucifixion; and, of course, the Resurrection.

What is the deal with the Resurrection? Perhaps, like daylight savings time, we may ask ourselves that. How are we supposed to understand something like Christ's Resurrection, particularly in the modern world where people don't rise from the dead on a regular basis?

Are we to understand it as a physical resurrection—a literal resurrection of the body, with the scars running up Christ's arms and down his side for doubting Thomas to touch? That's not a bad interpretation. It grants the Christian story a gravity and a reality for believers, like a solid historical point on the human timeline.

Are we to understand the Resurrection as a figurative resurrection, one that has its seat in folklore and myth-making? That's not a bad interpretation either. It maintains the history of the Christian story, of the genesis and evolution of its community. It also links the Christian story to the stories of other great religions of the world, allowing us to see their shared truth.

Perhaps there's a third way to understand it, an abstract way. The Resurrection is Platonic, about being brought back from the ignorance of death to the enlightenment of life, or even Gnostic, about dying to a false world and returning alive to a world of truth.

An abstract interpretation further aligns the Christian story with the great thinkers and schools of thought, the ones that have influenced the way that we experience and understand our reality and ourselves. Furthermore, it opens up the Christian story to us personally. The unbelievable becomes something we can comprehend, and what Christ did we can do, as long as we can grapple with the impossible so that it becomes possible in our lives.

But there's even another understanding of the Resurrection, and it's the most incredible understanding of them all. It's that all of those understandings are equally true at the same time. This is not waving them away as “it's all a matter of interpretation.” It's bigger than that. It's the ability to see the same phenomenon from different, coexisting vantage points.

For example, we can all agree that time is a construct. We can divide up the day and the night into hours or minutes or seconds, the same way that we can divide up the slow course of the Earth into weeks or months or centuries. But those hours are not really time. Hours are a useful way to comprehend time, but at the end of the day, time doesn't care what we call it.

Have you heard the phrase “map is not territory”? It comes from Science and Sanity, a book by Alfred Korzybski, a philosopher of language. The full quote is: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

Our map of the territory is not the territory it represents. It can come close to the real thing, perhaps even very close, but a map will never be that territory it describes. However, while that description is not the real thing, it does not lack value as long as we can learn something from it.

Map is not territory. Time is not territory either. It's a counting of beats, whether it's the ticking hand of a clock or the pulse of every human heart. The first chapter of the book of Genesis gives us a cosmic vantage point to comprehend time and what it measures:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the Earth, the Earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a mighty wind swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Time is a counting of beats that measures light and darkness, where the night ends and the light of day begins. But remember, time is not territory. It isn't even time. And time is not light, that elusive substance that slips between wave and particle and through our fingers into day and night and day again. Time is a map of that light.

In the creation story, light is many things. Light is the order of awareness, because when we see things for what they really are, everything is made clear in the light. Light is the awareness of creation, which is an awareness of the one who brought everything into being as we see the hand of the creator in the creation.

Light is also knowledge, because it is a dividing line between clarity and chaos, between the light of awareness and the darkness that was banished with the light of the new world. And finally, the definition of light is given directly: Light is good, and light is that which is good.

When we examine time, whether it's the past lives of holy men and women or our own futures, it's an opportunity to explore light, the goodness that we have seen and the goodness that we could be. When we explore with light, we banish the darkness of chaos and ignorance with order and understanding. But that light doesn't care what we call it or how we observe it. All that matters is that we see the light for what it is: light.

That means we can change the language we use to define the light—we can shift our focus by springing forward or falling back—but in doing so, all we are doing is understanding light a little differently, hopefully even a little better. That doesn't change what the light was and continues to be. It's all light. And it's all good.

Lent is not territory either. Our observation of Lent is not the same as Christ's Passion—what went into his mission or through his mind as he pulsed onward toward the Crucifixion and Resurrection. But Lent is a map of that territory. It's our way of discovering that territory every year.

Lent is a map of spiritual territory—perhaps well trod but always worth reevaluation. Lent shows us what has been, and Lent points at what could be, what we could be if we take on the humble mission, the compassionate spirit, the enlightened mind of Christ. Lent is a map of a beautiful country. Let's start exploring.