It's About Time

Reflection on Creation

Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara

December 2, 2012

audio link: http://www.ussb.org/mp3s/2012/20121202reflectionCBregante.mp3

A couple of weeks ago, my son Miles' teacher snagged me in the parking lot. I was just wondering, he said, why Miles is about 15 minutes late to class every morning. I stalled and tried to hide my blush. I've known this teacher for several years now. I wanted to say, oh, you know Miles. He's so absent minded and easily distracted, it takes him 15 minutes just to get his shoes on. However, while this may be true, it is not the reason why he is late to school. So I sort of gulped and said, I'd love to blame Miles for this, but it's me. I'm the one who can't get out the door on time. Then I made a vague promise about trying to do better.

I have a very slippery relationship with time. I am often breathless trying to catch up with it and, like a greased pig, it slips away from me all too often. I am a master of magical thinking when it comes to time. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, each new day I believe that I will be able to get everything done in the exact amount of time that proved to be insufficient the previous day (OK, the previous year, but who's counting). My relationship with time is like that definition of insanity: I do the same thing over and over again, but always expect different results.

This is not how I want to live my life of course, rushing from one thing to the next, always late, adrenalin coursing through my veins. If I ruled the world (god help us), everyone would be required to pause when they finished one activity before moving on to the next. Let's say you just finished a project at work. I would ask you to sit down in a nice, cozy armchair with a cup of tea or stretch out in a grassy meadow and watch clouds drift overhead. Perching on a rock overlooking the ocean would be permissible, as would twirling and dancing like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (for those who just can't sit still). Gazing at a delicate flower, a grand tree, or a passage of poetry would be highly encouraged. Then I would have you close your eyes for a few minutes of reflection or meditation. Just breathe in and out and begin to gently guide yourself back to yourself. Only when you feel sufficiently centered and present, would you be allowed proceed to the next activity in your planner.

I am not in charge, however. The clock ticks on and I must play by the same rules everyone else does. But I do have some choices in how I relate to time. I can slow my pace just a bit and focus my full attention on what I am doing in any given moment, rather than trying to absorb my entire to do list all at once. As Sister Joan Chittester says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. The tragedy is that we ignore so much of it in the interest of getting to the real stuff.”

The real stuff of every day is making breakfast, helping Miles find his shoes, taking a shower and getting dressed. It's going to my job and helping the disabled students I work with manage the real stuff of their lives, something that requires a special kind of attention to detail on both their parts and mine. The real stuff is a conversation with my daughter, Frances, about hair color or homework. It's walking the dog on the Ellwood Mesa and noticing the green grass beginning to poke through the grey. It's asking my husband about his day, it's making dinner and folding laundry.

I can do these things on auto-pilot or I can look at each of them as an opportunity to create a small moment of beauty, grace, awareness or connection. In an Op-ed piece for the NY Times Bill Hayes writes, “One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause — to memorize moments of the everyday.”

THIS is how I want to live my life: Alert to the extraordinary, aware of the beautiful hum of the ordinary. When I slow down, just a bit, just enough to pay attention and breathe more deeply, I create a sort of spiritual space, a place where relationships and ideas can grow, poking up through the grey field like the grass after the first rain of winter. Slowing down and paying attention invites creativity into my life. Because creativity begins with paying attention.

UU Minister Karen Hering writes, “For me, creativity is an act of slowing down. Paying attention. Taking time. Never doing in one day what could be spread out over seven, including a day of rest. It is no coincidence that this is also how I meet the divine.”