Time is not your enemy
It was noon, and Khalid jumped up from his office chair, realising he had only 30 minutes to get his coffee and meal. Precise as he is, he knew the nearest elevator was packed up at this hour and walked to the adjacent one, calculating the needed 4 minutes from the 32nd floor to the ground floor and 45 more seconds to get to the building cantine. He was right.
Once he ordered lunch, he sat down, opened his tablet, began striking through the completed tasks, and threw in a few more for the remainder of the working day. He wanted to assure himself not to be late for his daughter‘s celebration.
As he was jotting down, he spotted a little girl in the lobby, unusually resembling his daughter. The girl was doing nothing, just staring at the water trickling down the artificial waterfall inside the building. Khalid thought, “Ah, I wish I was a child. I remember the days when I could be present and do nothing.” He felt again the depth of each moment he was experiencing as a boy in his hometown.
His mind protested, “Cut that daydreaming. You are not a child anymore. You have a business to supervise. Those days will come when you retire.”
But another voice was probing stronger into Khalid‘s being as days passed. Sometimes, in the recesses of the night, he would open the booklet given by a local saint and read sentences he highlighted.
You‘ve taken a body. This body, being physical, succumbs to the dimensions of time and space. But you are not the body.
Time is more important than money. If you lose money, you can earn it again. But if you lose time, you can‘t earn it back.
Time is relative to each person. Each person experiences time differently, depending on their level of awareness.
Time is the perception within your consciousness experiencing a given vibration.
Time essentially doesn‘t exist.
That last sentence, contradicting as it is, shook him. “If time doesn‘t exist, how come I‘m aware of it?” He got an enlightening revelation: “If I‘m aware that time doesn‘t exist, then I‘m beyond time. And if I‘m beyond time, why am I chasing time as if trying to catch up on an old enemy?”
As time passed, Khalib‘s awareness made space to form new thoughts of him not being this organic vehicle but using it within the precious time medium to achieve a specific goal. He detached from time.
This new awareness helped him question each action he was doing, big and small. “Does this get me closer to my goal?” If the answer was negative, he abstained from acting on that task. Surprisingly, the majority of tasks dropped off. For some, it was easy to let go of, but others were painful to detach. He realised that over time he created too many possessions, physical and mental, that were reducing his speed and agility to make business and life decisions or change course.
As Khalib was shedding possessions, his life became lighter. And if you, the reader, assume that he quit his job to take a life in solitude, you are mistaken. Instead, Khalib‘s career advanced, and each quarterly financial report succeeded his previous one.
But what changed? Nothing externally. Everything internally.
Khalib lost his attachment to his possessions relating to his career. His new awareness of detachment from everything external made him fully immersed at the moment while doing the work. As a result, he was not troubled by his mind, which lingers in the past or the future.
Even though it appeared that he was not doing much, he was doing so much. Because of his detachment from the outcomes of his actions, he became free of worries and was so swift in doing that his mind could not even keep the pace to think and analyse.
In the past, he needed to calculate the time required to complete a task and the risks involved upfront. But that mental process created additional thoughts per second before, during the task, and afterwards while waiting for the outcome, which drained the body’s energy, requiring more food and more sleep to be maintained.
But now, he was so fast that it became pointless to create to-dos because by the moment he would create a to-do, he would already be solving it without the added emotions of worry, stress, and fear created by the expectations of the outcome, which source from the mind.
・・・
If you, as a reader, want to extract the key takeaway from this story, it‘s the following:
To widen your perception of time, reduce your thoughts per second. And to reduce your thoughts per second, broaden your awareness of the moment.
In simpler terms, think less, feel more.
I‘ll leave you with that.
