Tag: past

  • What you do in time.

    “Time is the most indefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it, and, like the flash of lightning, at once exists and expires.”   

        ~Charles Caleb Colton

     

     

    My brother wrote about time, its fleeting quality and the fact that the mind gets caught up in it or rather the mind and time go hand and hand.

     

    What is time?  Can you see it and does your body know what time it is on the clock, or does your body simply feel its way through the day?

     

    We are taught to eat by the hour hands on a clock and go to sleep by time, and not body’s physical feelings.  We expect certain things from children in time with little allowance for individual growth.

     

    Time seems to take priority over individual self.

     

    Time slips away we say or is life slipping away?  Is it that we allow our selves to watch time instead of seeing what we are doing?

     

    The more I am aware of what I am doing, how I am spending my time and with whom, the less time seems to matter.

     

    Maybe it isn’t about time at all but instead about being aware of your feelings at all times.

     

    Feeling your feelings in time.

     

    We somehow feel that by spending time, we are sharing ourselves and many times we are just sharing time.

    Doesn’t that remind you of school, taking up space and time?

     

    Life is so much more than taking up space and time in another’s life.

     

    Yet we some how feel it is okay to waste time, but what you are really doing is wasting your life.

     

    Your life has value minute by minute. 

     

    We add its value, with feeling and action; we add the content to time.

     

    You are what you do in time.

     

  • Present Training.

     

    As I sat in a room with four other people, one was leading the class and the rest of us were to follow along.  It seems an easy task, to sit and be led, to sit and absorb, to be one with the whole class.

     

    Yet I found myself not following along, but going against the other students. 

     

    One wanted to know what was up ahead, had to know, what would come next, and couldn’t relax in this chapter, worrying about the unknown.

     

    The other two wanted to either change the way things were being asked of us, or stepped into the past operation regaling us with stories that had nothing to do with where we were going.

     

    Their nonsensical behavior was like a loud horn blast coming in and interrupting the flow, their worries/concerns/thoughts of past and future events bleeding into the now.

     

    What a great thing to witness and a frustrating thing to be part of.

     

    I seen how their minds kept leading them away from the task at hand, like pre-school aged kids they needed to be rounded up and brought back to class.

     

    I just never thought that the hardest part of ‘teaching’ someone is to keep them present.

     

    Their attention span was limited and as the afternoon progressed it became worse, and the more they stole time from training, the longer training became.

     

    My patience of idling along in the present, while they played out in the past and future wore me out.

     

    To sit and observe this behavior is so intrusive and rude to the present.

     

    It is the ultimate battle in each situation, between what is now and what was or will be.

     

    As I sat on the sidelines frustrated, I too was battling with what is, for I expected us to all remain in the present training.

     

     

     

     

     

  • We Begin Again.

    "I exist in perpetual creative response to whatever is present."  Martha Beck

     

    In yoga today, I was watching how I felt in each posture, where my attention was or my attitude, was I accepting or enduring or somewhere in the future.

     

    Today I wasn’t fighting Bikram and the length of time he wanted me to stay with the posture, nor was I expecting me to do beyond what I did.

     

    If I went in very mindful and controlled and had a good breathing sequence going, I was amazed at how much more I could do.

     

    In fact I did so well on the Balancing Stick, I was eager to tell you all, but the next two were horrible, for I was ahead of the pose, expecting a perfect one before I even began, based on the prior one.

     

    Well, the prior one was gone, it was a whole new game, and I didn’t focus, breathe or concentrate.  I wasn’t in that pose, I fell out and had to chuckle at the difference between the two.

     

    I caught the feeling of how quickly moments go by, how we have to grab and drink of each one, and not worry about the flavor of the next, or indulge to long in a past one.  We have this moment, right here.  

     

    Right here, right now, we begin again. 

  • Manifesting Hope.

    In Martha Beck’s book “Leaving the Saints,” she wrote she read somewhere that,

     

    “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having a different past”

     

    And there is a freedom that comes when you realize that all hope is gone, when you are standing on the edge where the past is glaring at you in all its horrible honesty, and where the mind can no longer build dreams of past memories to sing a different tune.

     

    When the tune comes out the same no matter how you spin it, turn it, twist it, there is only one sad song and there is no hope of making it sound different than what it is.

     

    While it seems to put you in a hopeless state, that state of hopelessness is actually a good thing.  From there you have not thing left to lose.  It is over and done with and it requires nothing from you.  It is not a place to put your hope.

     

    Looking for a different past is just not possible. 

     

    It is hope less. 

     

    I had to go and look up that word.

     

    1. Having no hope; despairing. See Synonyms at despondent. 2. Offering no hope; bleak. 3. Incurable. 4. Having no possibility of solution; impossible.

     

    That meaning sounds so hopeless if you are in the state of hopelessness, it sounds downright depressing, wow. 

     

    So I had to look up the word hope. 

    Hope – to want or expect something: to have a wish to get or do something or for something to happen or be true.

    – confident desire: a feeling that something desirable is likely to happen

    – likelihood of success: a chance that something desirable will happen or be possible

     

    I wonder if you can get left in a spot where  you are hopeful of changing a hopeless past?  Where you use your hope wrong in a place where hope is use less.  It seems like people need to be taught where to use hope.

     

    I did not put my hope into the past changing, nor did I put my hope in even them changing, I only put my hope in that I could change.

     

    My hope was to change so the past is not repeated.

     

    All I had inside of me was hope, just hope.

     

    I took all my hope from the past and placed it in an unknown future.

     

    I stood behind hope and began walking a different walk, singing a different tune, and walking away from hopeless, while feeling the pull of hopeless I resolutely walked on.

     

    It literally seemed to always come down to two choices.

     

    In each choice I always picked hope.  I followed hope.

     

    I didn’t know where I was going, what I would look like when I got there or even if I would know it, but I followed hope.

     

    I blindly followed hope.

     

    I recall walking one day along the river sobbing, huge gulps of sorrow and my custom was to allow sorrow to walk with me in one direction, but when I turned around to head home I had to be possitive.

     

    This particular day, it was cold, very cold, clear and bright, snow crystals decorated all the trees along the river, the river itself a ribbon of sheer white, the sky the deepest blue and the sun shining bright lighting up everything in diamonds, and I said to my self, “I will go forth with love, joy and peace.”

     

    Love, Joy and Peace was the place I was headed.

     

    It seemed near impossible to comprehend a day where the sorrow would receed like a bad tide, but within me I placed all my hopes that eventually the tears would stop, that I would come to an end of painful things to look at, that all the years of blindly living, its karma would finally run out.

     

    Looking at this today, I can see that  I walked with hopelessness, despair and anguish in one direction, feeling my past, going into the emotions and feelings of abuse and when I turned around I was carried by Hope.

     

    I had to go and look up hopeful too.

     

    Having or manifesting hope. 2. Inspiring hope; promising. n. A person who aspires to success or who shows promise of succeeding.

     

    My walk back home was manifesting hope.

     

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