Dear Friends,

   Announcing our winter Sangha retreat at Sanctuary of Hope is scheduled for January 1, Thursday, thru 4, Sunday, 2009.  The focus of the retreat is:

Stillness Lives

Learn how to let stillness create your life.  And then watch  peace infuse every problem and conflict that you face. Ben Worth will provide instruction, direct guided meditations and facilitate group sharing in the framework of structured silence

Retreat lead by ben Worth 816-210-3378. To register, contact Julie Tennenbaum.

ABC Message

the

October, 2008

the October article

Time to Spare

by Dawn Downey

You spend half your life trying to find something to do with all the time that you rushed through your life trying to save. ---- Will Rogers

...

I winced when I saw the email from Hospice. I’d become a volunteer a couple of years ago. So I should be used to these messages. They come several times each week and this one turned out to be much like all the others.

“Are you available for two hours next Thursday?” it said. “We need someone to sit with a patient while her husband goes to the grocery store.”

I usually responded yay or nay based on the location and the date. But even before those details became apparent, greed surged through me, with guilt on its heels. I wanted to keep those two hours for myself, like a seven-year-old hoarding Halloween candy.

I swallowed the guilt, and replied, “Sorry, I’m not available.”

And then I put that precious time away, along with the rest of the hours I’ve been saving. I squeeze each one into a quart Mason jar—the kind my mother used for putting up green beans and jelly. I put up hours, and store them in the refrigerator.

When I added the two from Hospice to the collection, I surveyed my stash. The jar filled with the hour that I saved when I skipped my yoga class. Another jar with an hour saved when I didn’t call my brother. And behind a carton of spoiled milk—still another earned by getting up one morning at 6:00 instead of 7.

There’s not much food in the refrigerator. I’ve filled it up with all the hours I’ve saved by not going to the store.

I also hoard minutes. I stuff them inside plastic sandwich bags and toss them into dresser drawers, like sachet. They’re more important than hours, because I frequently find myself short of them. I got into the car to go to a meeting and discovered that I needed to stop for gas. I hadn’t planned for that. I wished that I’d grabbed a bag of minutes before I left the house.

And then there was that breakfast date. Just my luck, an accident way up ahead. I couldn’t even see it, but traffic backed up for miles.

At the site of the fender bender, piles of Baggies lay scattered along the road. They were filled with the minutes that the drivers up ahead of me had already sacrificed.

I store weeks in a cedar chest at the foot of the bed. I have one in there from a retreat I skipped five years ago. Another from not attending my nephew’s college graduation. And there’s the one from missing my favorite uncle’s legendary seven-day fiftieth birthday party thirty years ago.

Did I say years? I save them too. They’re packed away in the linen closet. Last week I went looking for a spare blanket. The years had been stacked precariously on the shelf, and when I opened the door they all fell out on my head. The years in which my mother and I had been estranged. The years that I worried about making enough money. Those that I spent looking for love. And all the years I climbed the corporate ladder. Never did get to the top.

...

I rushed through the airport, hoping to catch a connecting flight only to discover that it was cancelled. I had to wait two hours for the next one. I dragged my wheeled carry-on through the concourse to find something to eat. The case seemed heavier than when I took it on the plane. I unzipped it and two Mason jars fell out. The Hospice hours. I don’t want them now.

I’ve been alone for the weekend. Had all this time to do whatever I wanted. Paint the guest room. Do five loads of laundry. Listen to Fattah and Victor’s entire c.d.

As the sun went down on the first day, I got lonely, restless and then bored. I watched television until I realized I was staring at wrestling—and picking sides. That’s when I got suspicious.

I checked the refrigerator. As soon as I opened the door, a Mason jar fell out. And then another, which landed on my big toe. And then four others behind it. I caught them in my arms, but more kept coming. Dozens of jars, rolling all over the kitchen floor. Just as I suspected, I had too much time on my hands.

Time is a cosmic joke.

My brother and I have decided not to leave our relationship to chance. We schedule phone calls with each other. The last one was on a Sunday, at 4:00 in my house, 2:00 at his apartment in California. We talked together at one time although at the same time it was two different times. Is the telephone a time machine that allowed me to travel to the past? Or perhaps my brother had ventured two hours into the future.

When It’s time to watch the news at home, the clock on the stove says 5:57, the microwave says 5:55, the office radio blares 6:00. It’s 6:03 in the bedroom and 6:08 in the car. No matter how often I adjust the clocks, they always diverge. Each marches to the beat of its own drummer. When I’m focused on where I want to get to, this drives me crazy. But when the mind is quiet, I get the joke.

Time exists only in my thoughts. I’m hoping for a future that I’m trying to reach before it’s too late. Or dreading the one that arrives sooner than I want it to. Or obsessing about a past that will not get behind me. As long as thinking commands attention, time will be my nemesis.

But when I observe what’s going on right now, Time becomes a playmate.

I was so engrossed in writing that I forgot about yoga class. According to most of the clocks, I was going to be late. Instead of rushing, I remembered to breathe. I let go of thoughts about getting to class, and paid attention to getting dressed. When construction work at my freeway exit sent me on a detour, I let go of thoughts about the destination, and enjoyed the new scenery along the way. When I arrived at my 12:00 class at 12:15, he instructor greeted me with, “You got here at the perfect time. We just started.”

Then she kept us in session until a quarter past one. I got my full hour of yoga, even though time said I was fifteen minutes late.

A friend reported a similar lapse in linear reality. She’d scheduled an appointment that was forty minutes away from home. But out of habit she left her house with only thirty minutes to get there. Halfway to her meeting, she realized her mistake, and knew she would be late.

After a gulp of panic, she calmed herself. Don’t react. Just drive. She kept track of her breathing instead of her time. Just driving, she reached her exit sooner than she expected. When her mind told her she was lost, she ignored it. Then the street that she thought was a mile away, came up in a block instead. By slowing down instead of speeding up, she arrived 10 minutes early.

You won't run out of time, if you stop running.

Another fellow traveler on the Dharma road got an invitation to a lunch date. His friend had urgently wanted to talk with him about a family crisis. But the crisis didn’t occur until after he’d arranged the lunch. The friend was grateful for what he called a coincidence.

But I doubt it was a fluke. Time folds over on itself to accommodate its own whims. It taunts with glimpses of a non-existent future or imaginary past, and then snickers, “Tricked you again, didn’t I?”

I was worried about a conflict that I’d inadvertently scheduled. Two things that I really want to do, one of them with someone very special, who I feared might be mad when I confess my inefficiency. I dreaded the looming disaster, until I came back to now.

In this moment there is the breath, the song of a cardinal, or the sweaty palms of fear. But no future conflict can exist in this moment. Whenever thoughts reminded me that I was headed for trouble, I came back to now. Until—in this moment a phone call announcing that one of the events was cancelled.

I’d worried about something that lived only in the imagination.

Time is a party favor. A balloon that expands with every conscious breath. That swells with every nanosecond of awareness. With each sensation that I feel right now, each flavor that I taste right now, and every sound that I hear right now, I threaten time. It grows more transparent as I stretch it beyond its capacity to contain the Truth.

Every experience of intimacy with my environment draws me closer to that point in non-time that terrifies the mind.

That point when the thin skin of self-imposed limitations explodes in my face.

When the reality that thought produced drifts to the earth in shreds.

When I am left clinging to nothing, existing outside of time, free.

At that point, right now, I am.

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Read more articles by Dawn Downey at her website.

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