If you really want to get a feeling for how someone lives, look at the way they relate to time. Time is like a river we are all floating in. It surrounds us, encloses us, until we cannot even imagine a different way of being with it. But there is. I am lucky enough to live beside a two year old girl called Ruby. She has taught me a lot about time, gifts I was not ready to receive when my own daughter was that age. One night a few weeks ago, Ruby’s mother and I were out shoveling snow at about 6 o’clock, while Ruby played in the piles we were making. We shoveled away for about 40 minutes. I was conscious of dinner waiting for me inside, and the night growing darker and quieter. Just as we were finishing and getting ready to go inside, Ruby jumped up and announced with great energy and glee, “It’s time for a walk!”

“Now?” we asked her, looking around at the soft snowy night. “Yes, now!” she said, offering a hand to her mother, “Let’s go!” Her mother, who is quite extraordinary, laughed, took her hand, and walked down the road with her, into the night. I went back inside, according to my schedule. But the moment continued to haunt me. My heart recognized a lost opportunity.

Whenever I’m with Ruby, I remember when I was young, and my mother would wake me in the morning for school. I never wanted to get up. I would do this thing I called ‘slipping inside the moment.’ As I lay in bed, I would let myself fall inside each moment, until it stretched out, became elastic, and seemed to last far longer than what the clock was telling me.

During the last few years that I have been coaching, there is one thing that more of my clients have expressed than any other. And that is a great longing to be free of the tyranny of time. Some of them speak about the place of ‘just being’ or ‘being in the flow,’ and how that slips away and disappears when the day’s activities take over. One client of mine spoke last week about ‘that Sunday feeling,’ when there is nothing structured or planned-just a wide open space before you, ‘where you don’t have to be anybody.’ She said that was more important to her than anything.

I often invite my friends and students to take a whole day off each week. Dan Sullivan, one of Canada’s most famous coaches, has designed his whole program around this idea-that we access our deepest resources in that kind of unstructured time. In our community in India, we left every Monday free, and after a few years of empty Mondays, we couldn’t imagine how we had survived without them.

Most of the people I’ve suggested ‘one day off’ to have not been able to do it. It seems like a great speed and urgency have taken us over. Our world is on the edge of enormous, exponential change. Our collective response to it is a kind of manic busyness, and an inability or unwillingness to just stop and rest. Our very survival is threatened at this point, and the anxiety we feel has managed to deeply distract us with endless activity.

The feeling of urgency is kind of like a drug. It separates us from that which is truly important to us, from that which really matters. It doesn’t even give us time to contemplate what that might be. We forget, every time we say, “I have so much to do-there’s no time for me to stop.” that this is a choice we are making. Our whole relationship to time is a choice, something we can open up and inquire into. Time is not this solid reality we imagine it to be.

In India, they have one word, ‘kal’’ for yesterday and tomorrow. So do many indigenous societies. I remember, when I first arrived there, how annoyed I was by that word ‘kal.’ It seemed ridiculous that a whole country could function with one word that meant two completely different things. I thought it would lead to endless confusion. But I was wrong. What I discovered was that it was always perfectly clear, in the context of the moment, whether we were talking about yesterday or tomorrow. And one day, walking down the street, it finally dawned on me, what that little word ‘kal’ meant. It meant ‘not now.’ Whether it is tomorrow, or yesterday, is less important that the fact that it is not now.

How precious is this present moment, and how easily it slips through our hands. How many hours or days of unstructured time can we give ourselves? What would we discover about ourselves in those open spaces? What are the reasons we tell ourselves we cannot stop? How can we discover another way of relating to time?

I heard about a man who was getting older, and realizing how precious his Saturdays were-his days of doing nothing special. He figured out that he had about a thousand Saturdays left, if he lived to be eighty. He took a large jar, filled it with a thousand marbles, and put it on his window sill. Every Saturday, he removed one of the marbles. When they were all gone, he lived every single Saturday as if it were grace, an unexpected gift.

You can go to Peter Russell’s website (http://www.peterrussell.com) and calculate how old you are in days, instead of years.

The indigenous people of our world knew that in order to stay connected with what is whole and true inside them, retreat was essential. They found a time to be quiet each day, a bit longer time each week, longer than that once a season, and a full retreat once a year. If you look at their faces you can feel the silence that held them, nourished them. They lived their lives in the context of that which is unborn, unstructured, and eternal. I was watching a small group of people having a cigarette break the other day, and realized that this is one of the great secrets about the tobacco habit. It allows us to stop for a few minutes, and just do nothing. The Marlboro man, riding silent and alone on the range, called to a whole generation of smokers.

I’ve decided to call my workshops and courses ‘retreats’ from now on. I want to create a container, a circle, a place where we can meet ‘at the still point of the turning world.’
‘Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’ (T.S. Elliott)