Time and Engagement

  In my recent blog entries, I have been exploring the idea that sometimes what might seem repetitive and uncomfortable is actually a disguised journey of the spirit. I take my Thursday meditation practice to be one such example. It's sometimes hard for me to believe that a person with my kind of shyness could have co-facilitated such a group for so long. One of the things which motivates me is that it gives me time to practice responding to imperfect moments: those times when you wish you were more prepared, but aren't so terribly prepared on the inside, yet need to prepare something anyway. In the past, I used to get very uncomfortable and withdrawn at the prospect of not being emotionally ready to lead a group of people in some capacity. But lately, especially with the facilitation and my Saturday teaching job, I have noticed a tendency to just throw out what I have, without having to worry too much about planning what I will say and when.  The secret is in knowing that there is no time whatsoever, and that this concept of "having a lot of time" or "having no time" is really illusory. It's based on the false idea that time consists in a series of successive steps, when it's actually the mind that breaks time down into such "steps".
   It seems to me that once one starts to create a working context around an activity (the what, the where, the when, the details), what follows is a growing sense of confidence which, in turn, leads to the growing sense that time is a linear process. At the end of the day, it's not "time" itself which moves people through life, but one's creation of time, especially through a choice to meaningfully engage a process. So one needn't worry so much about preparing anything, other than to be familiar as much as possible with a process. It's no so much about preparing everything that could possibly happen as it is about having the confidence that you yourself are the "weaver" of moments, and you can make sense of different moments. Time is not moving you at all, and you are not bound by time.