time

Last night I was at a meeting, sitting there for 90 minutes and listening. I kept thinking about how I wanted to go home, how I wanted to be free to do what I wanted to do - or maybe not even that, free to do what I felt obligated to do. (Honestly, how much of our time is stuff we want to do, and how much is fulfilling mandates.)

When all of a sudden I had a brief moment of insight, or kensho. Aha! I realized. "That is what I do. I do time." Maybe the event horizon changes, but the horizon of what happens next is always there. I can't wait to get paid, I have to prepare for a meeting, the next thing that happens after this will be more interesting than what is happening right now. Because of this realization, I felt myself actually be present in the moment. I observed things and felt the way I felt and the meeting was a lot less boring.

It is super-interesting to me how little time I actually spend here, right now. How much of "lost time" isn't the moments that we have lost to the depths of memory until we bite into a madeleine, perhaps the real lost time is the time that we spend in the past or planning our escape from they assumed tyranny of the moment. The unbearable traffic jam that we want to end so that we get to the next thing... which we then want to escape from to the thing afterwards. The real "lost time" is happening right now.