Time is Fluid

Have you ever noticed

the antinomy

in the dichotomy

That as days drag on,

weeks fly past ?



Time is fluid,

see it flow.



Have you noticed that

Months trudge ahead

as years flit away ?



Time is fluid

see it flow.

Sometimes quick,

sometimes slow.



Time is fluid, realize this.



And when we say

that times have changed,

is it we

who have changed the most ?





"Time is fluid here"

Many out at sea will attest to this fact. Time doesn't
work the same at sea like ashore. Every day seems longer than twenty four
hours but before you know it

, weeks have passed away !

Really...out at sea , under the endless skies and the
stars (a phrase I seem to overuse !),when you have all the time in the
world and don't know what to

do...that is when you realize...that Time , like any other unit of
measurement is only a perception and being so , is easily manipulated by
the observer. Most of us do it

unconsciously. We are not aware that we are stretching time, or shortening
it or sometimes bending it to suit our map of reality.



As a famous man with pointy hair once said "Time is relative"



I always wished I had a good comeback ready for that.



I didn't believe in living in the present. As a kid , I thought it was
something literally impossible to do.



I used to argue

"Living in the present is such a fallacy !"



"You want to live in the present ?"



"Here's a moment on its way...wait for it...wait for
it...wait for it...oops ! There it goes !"

"Let's try that again..."

"Here's a moment once again...wait for it...wait for
it...wait for it...oops ! There it goes again..."

"Did you see it ?"

"Let's try that again...I'm kidding !"



Let's face it. The present moment is so brief and fleetingly infinitesimal
that it slips away before one can grasp at it.

It is one of the most profound and perplexing conundrums the consciousness
can face. (caution: Excessive Alliteration ahead !)



We are trapped between memories of the past and anticipation of the future.

Both nonexistent, both intangible !



As the cliche goes "Now is all you have"

(Quick !Here's another cliche :"Love is all you need")



It wasn't until I experienced being in the present that I realized that
Being in the Present was possible.

It was at a carnatic music concert hosted by Flautist Extraordinaire Praveen
Godkindi. When they began , the music was so powerful, so overwhelmingly
beautiful , that I simply lost myself. The music was simply too delicious
for me to relive my past or invent my future. I was there , at the then.
Then and there came together and it was a profound moment of realization of
the loss of ego and being totally in the present.



You can do it too.

Eckhart Tolle , author of 'Power Of Now' suggests that this is the key:


'End the delusion of time. Time and mind are inseparable. Remove time from
the mind and it stops - unless you choose to use it. To be identified with
your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost
exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless
preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and
acknowledge the resent moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises
because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of
salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions'



For the uninitiated, living in the present can be excruciating. On
the ship we go through long intervals of time, where one has to notice
everything around him and every minute has to be accounted for. Especially
during tricky river passages or potentially dangerous ship to ship
transfers.

For people who are not used to it, this forced awareness of each and every
passing moment causes extreme mental distress and unbearable physical
fatigue.

This is where one has to have a single minded laser like
concentration. But there is a caveat against this single minded
concentration though. One cannot develop tunnel vision syndrome and filter
out other important information during these critical times. Especially in
transit through the busy Singapore straits or while traversing through the
foggy river of shanghai , one should aim for a scattered concentration, a
geometrical expanding volume-like thinking ,instead of the standard linear
thinking we are taught

elsewhere. It is an exhausting and draining Zen experience which we sailors
shake off by taking power naps.



Come to think of it , the whole essence of Zen consists in walking
along the razor's edge of Now - to be so utterly, so completely present that
no problem, no

suffering, nothing that is not who you are in your essence, can survive in
you. In the Now, in the absence of time, all your problems dissolve.
Suffering needs time; it cannot survive in the Now.



As the cliche goes...Now is all you have.



So if history repeats and a famous man with pointy hair says once again that
"Time is relative"...

Then I'd say "So is my mother-in-law, but what can I do about it
?"



(you can applaud now !)



Word of the day:

Antinomy(n) - A contradiction between two statements that seem equally
reasonable.



Dichotomy(n) - Being twofold; a classification into two opposed parts or
subclasses.


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