Time

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a torture chamber and these two metal plates are slowly moving toward me to crush me. I can’t stop their movement. Before I know it, it will be 10:30pm, our official bedtime (though we almost always go to bed later that).

I need to figure out how to do my stuff before then. I don’t worry too much earlier in the day, because I have the rest of my life left. Oh, I mean the rest of my day. But by 5:20 pm I’m starting to clutch. Especially when I’m going to the temple tonight to sit.

When I wake up, I usually am tired with what I was thinking about yesterday, and not yet into thinking about anything new. I just expect something to happen as the day progresses.

It is like taking pictures. I have no idea what is going to call out to me, “take my picture.” Something eventually does. I remember a teacher of mine bragging that he went shooting with a friend and his friend couldn’t find anything thing to take a picture of, but he found treasures everywhere he looked.

I was wondering if it is a defect in my seeing that I can’t see pictures everywhere. Why are some vistas not pictures and other vistas pictures?

So as I sit here with the metal plates slowly crushing me, I write about time. At the gym, I want time to go faster so I can go home. But the rest of the day I want it to go slower so I can get something done. Ideally I’d like a time app that would work slowly or quickly as needed. If I were king, I could do that. All the clocks in my kingdom would be synchronized to my time. We’d all go to bed at 10:30 pm, but it would be my 10:30 pm, not the arbituary one.

I realize I’m not king, though, and that clocks are pretty consistent.

Back to the drawing board. Samuel Johnson wrote, “If you don’t get half your work by 10 am, chances are the other half will go undone.”

Off to sitting.