Time is a continuum

I don’t wear a watch, there are no clocks in my house, nor is there a calendar; yet I mark the new and full moon, take stock of my life at every birthday and use the window between Christmas and New Year to set intentions for my life. A curious relationship with ‘time’, yet a relationship nonetheless. We are all connected to it in some way, acutely aware of its omnipresence and its role in our lives.

Time is one way in which we measure our presence, our achievements, our contributions; it is one way within which we make sense of our human existence. Yet, like anything, if we hold it too tightly, its grip can take hold and choke the life from us.

In the lives we live, it’s easy for us to get engulfed by the most negative aspects of time and our relationship to it. In particular, many of us have tendencies to rush into ‘closing things down’ or feel pressurised to ‘finish stuff off’.

Ironically, it can be most useful to leave some things undone. When we allow some loose ends to remain, we leave some energy in the system of life. When we leave energy in the system, life can breathe — it is able to flow, to continue its onward movement and growth.

So I want you to remember that time is a continuum. There is no hard ending, no real division between the portions that we recognise, no full stops. Instead, there are many semi-colons, many ways to pause for breath in the on-going sentence of life.

• How would you feel if you loosened your grip on time and its grip on you?
• What can you leave ‘undone’, to enable it to keep going?
• What if your ‘sentences’ came with some semi-colons instead of full stops?

Take a breath; continue.

Take care for now, Laura