From Time to Time

Is time our friend or foe? Much of the language we use around time conveys it as a valuable commodity. We Make Time, Spend Time, Share Time, Use Borrowed Time, Lose Time or Don’t Have Time. But our relationship with time also has a “speed” to it that is, shall we say, confusing. Time Stops, Time is Flying By, Time is Dragging or Slipping Away. We Kill Time, Pass Time, Waste Time, and Race Against Time. It seems we never really are in “right relationship” with it. Too much, too little, too fast, too slow; it is safe to say, our relationship with time is rather…complicated.

Motivated by survival, the concept of time originated as a way to track the cycles occurring in the physical world and to predict and organize human activities, such as planting and harvesting, in response to them.

And if you think about it, the human brain has an incredible capacity to travel in time. We record experiences from our past and recall them through our memories. And we can travel into the future, when we make plans, innovate or problem solve. But what is the feeling state that generally accompanies looking backwards or forwards?

Truly consider this…and put your answers in the comment section.

Our brains biologically evolved to record and keep close account of past experiences that did not provide optimal survival conditions. As such, we tend to look backwards with a keener eye for the decisions and events we did not meet well. We all have stories about the moments that ushered in feelings of overwhelm, defeat or emotional injury. The people, places, and things present at the time all carry the vestiges of an “emotional charge” that often have a flavor of regret, recrimination, injustice, or wrongdoing.

When our brains attempt to process thoughts about the future, we carry an extra burden. With so little that can be known, our minds are not only unsettled by uncertainty, but often rely upon the more limited and distorted subset of information stored from our past experiences. In this state, our feelings are often marked by trepidation, anxiety, agitation, and fear.

If you have any doubt about what I am pointing towards, please look at how the past and future were being weaponized during this past election cycle. Accusations from the past and dread for the future seesawed back and forth through the campaign messages. And I am not going to lie, it has been heartbreaking watching so many of my friends and family members succumb to anger and fear and turn against each other.

For eight years now, I feel like I have been trying to hold onto two frayed ends of thread tied to separate ships moving in opposite directions. Clearly the thread is woefully inadequate for the job. And while the speed of the ships did not feel significant, their momentum was certain and without negotiation. I did not realize it at the time, but in my quest to find any means possible for people to see each other and connect, I was attempting to hold the center of NOW and keep people in the PRESENT.

This is a newfound awareness about YOU.logy. I’m not sure if I have shared this with you before, but the original idea of YOU.logy arrived during a meditation about 18 months ago. It arrived as a story about a little girl who just experienced the death of her grandmother. She had a charming misunderstanding about the eulogy her mother was preparing and concluded with childlike idealism that she would say pleasant things to everyone she met. What emerged was a youthful, kindhearted, and quixotic mission, fraught with missteps and tender moments.

As I wrote and shared the story, my early readers consistently found the character lovable, but not entirely believable. They insisted her observational skill and social attunement was not age appropriate. Because I saw this story as something I was being of service to, when it was meeting resistance, I concluded I must need to share it differently.

The evolution of this idea occurred as I was fumbling through a major life transition. My husband and I had just closed our custom frame studio and neighborhood-based art gallery, and I had walked away from everything that externally validated me. I was as emotionally attached to what we had created as I was uncertain where I was headed. It was at this nexus of past, present and future that I discovered…endings provide a gift.

Finality gives us a new set of eyes. We look with a different impulse to appreciate what was experienced and to find the wisdom from our past. When we do this well, it provides us with the courage to step into the uncertainty of the future. Endings hold a profound importance, and I believe it has something to do with how it braids our concept of time PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE into a single pointed NOW-ness.

Culturally, we are ruled by efficiency, progress, and ambition. These mindsets forever push us forward, away from the past and out of the present, often creating the feeling of racing to the finish line. An ironic momentum for a culture that also holds a strong propensity to deny death’s inevitability. I believe YOU.logy’s shared name and close association with the end of life is no accident. I believe it is a call to harness the wisdom of finite time.

You have heard it said, only the dying are truly living. When we realize our time is finite, we live more fully in the present, feeling more deeply, and appreciating every experience while also detaching more quickly from the differences that once kept us defended. What if we entered our conversations with the same attunement and awareness?

This past election cycle illustrated how much we are hardwired to bring our painful past into the present moment and how much we project it into the future. Anger about the past and fear for the future are bookending and polluting our pure moment of NOW. They are contagions that breed judgment and intolerance and all of us lose when we treat each other and our relationships as if they are disposable.

YOU.logy is a simple way back to connection…one present moment conversation at a time.

There is no doubt, each of us have events from our past that our brains believe we need to stay attentive to in order to safeguard our future. Like wearing a monocle, our instinct is to hold an eye on the past and filter our present-day experience through a lens of divided perceptions. But are we aiding or distorting?

Also packed into the luggage of our past are MANY moments of victory, strength, success, and perseverance. We fall short in remembering and acknowledging those. In fact, the life experiences we have met with skill or capacity often slip completely out of sight and out of our awareness. We do not even recognize them as exceptional or have the biological instincts to keep them top of mind. They are more likely to be recognized by someone else who sees us in a way that we cannot. These are the parts that often get recalled and shared during a traditional eulogy.

Because we tend to wait for endings before we even look and consider expressing our appreciation for someone, we are assured of yet another companion…regret. Often endings harbor a bittersweet reality that a lot of goodness was overlooked, taken for granted or perhaps even squandered while we remained defended against the parts, we found too different or intolerable to be around.

As I watch my friends and family members contract into even smaller social circles defined by some necessary need for agreement, I sit dismayed, feeling as if the world is diametrically opposed to the idea I am trying to share in YOU.logy. In this state, I have felt every dismissive comment made in the past and every inquiry about why would anyone do this? And it occurred to me maybe it is too big of an ask…

Before you think I have succumbed to defeat, let me offer a simple metaphor and more accessible starting point for practicing YOU.logy. A couple of years back I experienced a frozen shoulder. I had a great deal of discomfort and significantly reduced mobility. (Not all that different than a rigid mindset and hardened heart.)  I found a chiropractor who taught me flexibility exercises, made spinal adjustments, and coached me on better posture. Today I have a full range of movement and only occasional mild pain. But my improvement did not happen overnight. Nor was it a straightforward linear path.

The single biggest challenge I faced was the attention needed to improve my posture. Just like our thoughts, I inhabited my body with a great deal of habituation and unawareness. To improve it, I had to become more mindful. But the demands of my day made it impossible to give it the kind of present moment attention it needed. So, I had to practice focusing on it in small intervals.

I started by going for a short walk and practiced holding my posture as I was instructed. With each step, I would pay attention to how my body felt in this new way of holding it. Inevitably, as I walked, my attention would lapse, and my body would fall back into its usual position. I would have to bring myself back to the corrective posture repeatedly. Over time though, my body started to relate to the corrective posture as its new normal and the older one started to feel less comfortable. It was slow, patient, ever demanding attention that over time altered my way of being.

Just like poor posture, with no attention given to it, we are allowing our present-day experiences to be negatively influenced by our past. And while we may never lose our brain’s evolutionary focus on painful events that occurred, I wonder why we would resist having our future experiences potentially positively influenced by someone else’s perspective. Could a different lens inform our future if we practiced staying attentive to what is being shared in real time with each other right now? Who knows, we may discover something quite remarkable within ourselves and others.

YOU.logy is an intention to use our finite time to find connection. I challenge each of us to enter our next conversation with the PRESENCE of NOW. Ask yourself, what am I experiencing right here, right now with the person right in front of me? We may never be free of the pull between past and future, but with practice we will improve how we hold ourselves in the present.