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. . . But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do, once you find them
Jim Croce; Time in a Bottle
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Dad's watch on a fence post, enjoying Freeze Out Lake, 2019.
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My father had a love affair with linear time.
A flurry of packages landed on our front porch one Monday morning after my father died. They held my small part of his things that my sister gathered when she cleaned out his Assisted Living Apartment. I had forgotten they were coming.
My daughter Rose spotted them first. Four boxes. One of them huge. Each crammed full of the styrofoam popcorn that I usually recycle. I scoop mounds of them into garbage bags, without the will to do anything other than throwing them away.
Whoever at the shipping store that packed these boxes loves tape as much as my daughter. The outer boxes hold taped inner boxes. Inside the inner boxes, each item is wrapped in bubble wrap. All of it secured with packing tape.
In one box there are several smaller bubble-wrapped items. I lift yet another out. And stop as if I’ve been hit and I have been. Belly-hit. Frozen. It’s his watch. The watch Dad lived by, compulsively checking it, confirming whatever his internal clock was or was not telling him, never trusting his own knowing. And in that moment of seeing his watch, there in the box, a Seiko, gold-plated, unadorned, with a clock face not digital dials, a watch he had worn for as long as I could remember, it is clearer to me than it had been in the weeks since I left his bedside that he has passed. Or his watch could not be in this box, in my hand.
It has been on my bedside table since. Sometimes it travels with me when I go somewhere I would have liked to share with him. Though that’s less frequent than it was. Time has softened that impetus.
My father had a love affair with linear time. I don’t know if that began in the Army when he was an artillery observer in WWII, or it happened over the 45 years of his commute on the passenger train that traveled the peninsula into San Francisco where he was a comptroller at Macy’s California. His life ran by schedule, a schedule my mother resented and often sabotaged.
Mom liked to maximize her time. To her and for her, arriving ten minutes before an event was wasted time. There were always just a few more things to do, another errand to be crammed in. My father’s preference was to arrive early, to be settled in right on the clock, then to leave about five minutes before anything was completed.
The tension between them around time was ongoing, incessant, and noisy. It's funny and not funny, then, that I married a man who had little concern about schedules and time frames. He liked to say he was functioning on Indian time, a maddeningly fluid concept for me.
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We're captive on the carousel of time | We can't return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.
- Joni Mitchell
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Time is, in fact, fluid
There are myriad catch-phrases and cliches around the concept of time, some of which are actually true.
Time heals can translate to healing takes time, it’s a process that can’t be rushed. Grief is like that. I miss my dad every day but it's not a searing pain now. There are things that can accelerate healing, but ultimately it’s true: time heals.
Time as something we never have enough of can translate to “I don’t have time to focus on my health and well-being.” Actually, though, you don’t have time to not pay attention because whatever unfolds next in response to any stress you experience will take more time and more dramatic interventions. We can actually slow time — people do it in meditation. Time is in fact fluid. We try to solidify it with our schedules and it’s true that scheduling can make it seem even more scarce because we so often over-schedule, like my mom liked to do. Like I have too often liked to do.
Like all of life, time is in constant flux. It goes through periods of expansion. The once upon a time wide open smoke-free skies of Montana summer and the reduced views in a smokey horizon, or the long dark of winter, express a type of expansion and contraction like that of time. In the healing systems I’ve studied, expansion and contraction are important concepts. BodyTalk builds them right into a formula, augmenting the internal relationships it seeks to improve. That can become as specific as how much expansion? 20%? 5%? Often, the more specific a formula is, the more effective.
Your BodyMind’s internal systems track time in a few ways. In part 2 of this 3-part series on time, we’ll briefly explore the idea of Epigenetics and aging; your Circadian Clock, the Chinese Clock, and the telomeres on your DNA. For a deeper, more personal exploration of how these concepts influence your health, I invite you to book a session.
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This is Part 1 of a 3 part series on time. The next installment will arrive in your in-box early next week.
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Is it TIME to book a session?
Mind Spirit Healthcare: try it on Zoom or on the front porch, for vaccinated, returning clients.
- Schedule a 20-minute call to chat about what's challenging your health. The best way to do that is to text: 406-920-2691. Let me know three times you have available and I will either confirm one of those or make an alternate suggestion. You may also schedule through Schedulicity. (BTW, BodyTalk IS effective at a distance. Read how and why here).
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