Speaking with a friend over the weekend, the issue of not having enough time came up. He doesn’t have enough, can’t find enough. He is indeed really, really busy, with a demanding work schedule and at times unforeseeable hours. He feels like he pretty much ricochets from one thing to the next with not as much agency as he’d like.
A few days earlier, the news had come out that one of Einstein’s theories/predictions, that black holes not only exist, they can collide and send out gravitational waves. This was pretty amazing stuff.
I began thinking about some of his other theories, including that time is relative, that “the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”
Personally it increasingly feels like time is as much an attitude as a reality. Like, could it be relative? The more you rigidify and resist, struggle against its confines, the more those confines are real. The more you, well, go with the flow, for lack of a better phrase, the more the confines will dissolve.
I’m not sure if this quite makes sense. I was writing about it I think in December when I had taken on the teaching gig, and it felt like A LOT. Because it was! But that I was trying to work with my mind about it so that it would not be quite so overwhelmingly a lot.
I think it was the TV producer Shonda Rimes who took a year and said yes to everything (then wrote a book about it). It sounded like an Oprah moment run amok, a Favorite Thing on steroids, but her story caught my attention. I probably heard about it, of course, on the radio in the car. She was challenged by a friend or her sister or someone for saying no too much and being negative, so she decided to change her ways.
It’s like an accordion, I keep thinking about time. It expands and contracts, somehow. It’s better if we aren’t rigid and no-y, but supple and yes-y. Sort of.
So for my friend who feels compressed, it may be as much a question of leaning in, of attitude towards what he has to do as much as what is actually on the schedule. I know, it sounds a little facile. But isn’t it all relative…