It is so very easy to get caught up in the minuta, the busyness of life, isn’t it?
You think that you’re going to achieve something, and suddenly the time has passed so quickly, and maybe you did finish your task, for sure, but perhaps it took longer than you thought, or perhaps you finished it on time, but it still took time.
And time is the only thing we cannot recover. We can recover our money if we’ve made a bad investment on the stock market, for instance. The money is all gone.
It can be recovered. I can say that with some experience. I can recover my beauty.
I taught a plastic surgeon once, and he told me that he could recover people for a certain amount of money. He could make them ten years younger. But time, time is gone.
Time is spent. So the question always becomes, how can I catch time? Because it seems that we all have the same amount of time, don’t we?
We have 80 or 85 or 90 years of life. But some people seemingly rush through that time, and they don’t really have a lot of fun with the time that they’ve been allotted for their piece of life.
They end up at the end of life, and they’re kind of shocked. I’ve heard this expression. It went so fast.
But that’s not true, is it? It only goes at the speed that you allotted mentally. Because everyone has the same amount of time.
24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So the question becomes, how can I perceptually slow down time? How can I give it more value, if you will?
Well, of course, one way which we’ve spoken about many times is of course a notebook. Every single day in my notebook, I should write the day and the date, so I can actually document today. But how do I catch time, so to speak, in the moment?
I had an experience today, I was on my way, I went to the gym, and I was kind of harried, little bit behind, and then I went to some shops because I’m off to Canada next week. So everything has to be finished, of course.
And then I was on my way to another shop, and suddenly, just as I got off my scooter, a glint of sunshine hit my face.
For a moment, it startled me, and it paralyzed me in a very positive way, and I stood there basking in the sunshine for a moment, and I got thinking about catching the moment. And I do this sometimes. I think we all do, but not enough.
Not enough. So, I guess, what are the advantages of that moment, right? What are they?
What would be an advantage of catching the moment? Because there’s lots going on, right? Lots going on.
Well, one of the ways is that for that brief moment, the stress and the anxiety that I was feeling for being a little bit late dissipated. I was free to catch that moment and bask in the sunshine.
And I do think after I finished that, that I actually felt more lucid. I made a note of the tasks that I was going to finish before the end of the day. And I actually did.
Then I thought, well, I should write something down, which I proceeded to do. I opened my notebook and had some ideas and I wrote them down. So I asked myself, was that moment of creativity brought about because I actually caught this moment?
It kind of puzzled me for a moment, because if that’s the case, I most assuredly are going to catch more of them. Absolutely, without question at all.
And I did feel closer to myself, to who I perceive myself to be, which, of course, is an ongoing process, isn’t it?
I think a big part of catching the moment is that you feel as if you can, for just a brief moment, be stable, if that makes any sense at all, that there is real purpose to my piece of life. The three questions always, why am I here?
What’s my mission? What happens when I leave here? And I say these things, but I often don’t catch the moment to be able to analyze them.
Really. And so in all of this, I walked away with a, I don’t know, I felt stronger, more disciplined than I asked myself.
How do I get into the moment? And of course, I’ve taken the yoga class, I’ve gone on the yoga seminar in India and et cetera, et cetera, you know.
I like so many people, there’s so much data that’s coming to us, but most assuredly, many, many people suggest that I should catch my breathing at this moment, so I can actually feel that I am alive.
So once I catch my breathing, then I can do the quick analysis of course, of the senses, the five senses. And I like to also think of the sixth sense, the safety sense, if you will. Am I feeling safe at this moment?
And then I tried to focus on what was going on. And I was at the corner of a busy street, to be fair. So yes, I did have the glint of the sunshine, but I also heard the noise of the traffic rushing by.
There were some pedestrians in the far far distance. I could hear birds twittering and children laughing. So all of those images came to me at that moment, right?
And then I think the big one for me, I just made an attempt just to stop the mind. What had to be done in the next few moments just didn’t seem to really matter.
I often tell my students, and I’ve actually read this and I think it’s very true, if I were not here, all the stresses and anxieties that exists in my mind wouldn’t matter, right? It wouldn’t matter at all.
So I give myself the pain, the anxiety, the frustration of being alive. And obviously, the learned people have, most assuredly, been able to find a way to calm this.
So if you meet a wise person, and we’ve all met them, I’m sure, people that were enlightened across the whole range of religions and philosophies, but people that somehow had a magical glint, use this word again, a magical moment or a piece,
something going on in their eyes. You can feel it when you stand next to them. They kind of embrace you. And for me, most assuredly, it was my grandfather.
He was a magical man to me. World traveler, but more importantly, a traveler on the inside. He had experienced trauma in his life, great loss.
And ultimately, he came out of that to build a positive life, and isn’t that the journey for all of us, right, really? So I think to catch the moment is so important.
When we walked on the Camino, I found that it was also a time that you were inside your own thoughts, because you had the pace of the day, right? Some of the distances were 30 to 50 kilometers in a day. I had a walking stick.
I could hear it clicking on the ground, and you went internally. You really did. It was a magical time.
So I guess that’s the secret for all of us, isn’t it? Just to spend a moment to, if you will, catch the moment, catch the time. And you know what they say.
You know what they say. Critical thinking is everything, especially if you’re going to catch that critical moment. And critical thinking is great, truly great.
You take care. God bless. Bye bye.