Learning To Be At Peace With Time (Part 1)

Our Relationship With Time

Each of us aspires for emotional freedom or a peaceful state of mind where we are at ease with ourselves and content with everything around. Having certainly tasted such moments, we all know how fulfilling and soothing they are. But we are not able to sustain them. Our quality of life largely depends on how we deal with the three aspects of time – past, present and future. So, whether we live as masters of time or as its victims, depends on which aspect of time we place our mind on or give our emotional energies to. The present moment is all that we have, and we need to make it productive. But most of our time our mind is not always in the present. It slips into scenes from the past or creates projections about the future. Past memories and future plans are needed, but being so engaged in looking back or looking ahead that we miss living in the present is not the right thing to do and does not give you good results in any sphere of life. 

Thinking of the past means reconstructing scenes over which we have no power. They live only in our memories. When a past memory is triggered, an entire spectrum of emotions associated with that memory also get triggered. There are also big chances that we drift into another past memory from the first past memory and then into another. So, we may experience an emotional roller-coaster, depleting our resources of time and energy. Sometimes we wonder – Why am I feeling so uneasy? I was just sitting here doing nothing, but my mind was entangled in the past. Thinking of the future means painting on the screen of our mind, a scene of what we want or what we anticipate. That scene may or may not become a reality, we don’t know. But the mind is now carrying the excess baggage of all these scenes and hence its energy gets depleted. A mind pre-occupied with the past or future, ruins the present. Tired, anxious, or upset, it mostly remains vulnerable and weak. As we can see, time does not actually harm us. Our mind chains itself to the past and future and causes its own suffering. This is when we become slaves of time. In the next message let us explore how to master the dimension of time.

(To be continued tomorrow …)