On this, the day after my 53rd Winter Solstice, I am reflecting more attentively than usual on the nature of time.
Our understanding of time, or more specifically, our interpretation of it, is a human construct. Time is in the eye of the beholder, if you will. This was clarified to me through a beautiful piece featured in an Op-Doc series by the New York Times on the elements of the periodic table that shape our lives. But just the week before I came to appreciate the human application of the element Cesium, a brilliant friend said something to start me on this current path of exploration. When I asked her how she was feeling now, more than a year after a trauma that changed her life, she said simply: “Time is an element.”
In my lifetime, there have been 19,645 sunsets and sunrises. Those that I have actively witnessed have been far fewer, even though I’ve often sought private audiences. I can tell you where I was, and with whom, only for a few in my entire life. I remember my daughter’s first active sunrise viewing in the Zhangjiajie Mountains of China, and her first sunset in Joshua Tree National Park. I remember waiting for the flashpoint in one particular sunset on the Big Island in Hawaii. One evening I witnessed one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen from my friend’s house right outside this city where we live. There was also the time I returned home from a long trip, ordered take-out pizza on my way from the airport, and then sat on the Bluff on the western edge of town to eat it by myself while the sun set behind the opposite ridge. Aside from these notables, there have been so many that I have seen and celebrated. I consider myself lucky.
I have been thinking about the dark lately. It’s easy to do during deep winter in my city in a valley on the eastern edge of the Pacific Time zone. The sun sets at 4pm, but the dusk sets in around 2, and that’s only on the days when light breaks through the clouds in the first place. It’s also easy to focus on the dark when you are sad, which I am. My dad died in August. I feel the loss of him in this Earth place so deeply that it physically hurts me sometimes. I miss him.
But I realized something yesterday. Or rather, I observed it. It’s no epiphany by any means. Time goes on. The world on which we live slips on in perpetual motion. As it orbits and spins, we ride into the rays of the sun and we ride out of them. Over and over and over and over—on a small scale, by days, and on the next up unit in this system of measurement, by years. (Months, of course, are the moon’s). So my realization in all of this? Winter Solstice is the year’s sunset. And here we are now on the other side, moving gently and relatively slowly into sunrise. The six-month sunlit aurora begins.
I was recently in a yoga class where the instructor directed our breathing. Don’t pause between breaths, she guided. Breathe in and immediately breath out in a constant flow. Circular. Continual.
We all know about the involuntary functions of the autonomic nervous system. When we are alive and not under stress, our bodies function without conscious effort. Our hearts beat. Our blood moves at a life-sustaining pressure at a steady temperature. We digest. And, yes, we breathe. Without thinking, we breathe in and out without interruption. Of all of these, breath is the most accessible to us to shift into manual control.
In that yoga class, my emotion-strained vagal system craved a break from the uninterrupted flow of unconscious living, so I tuned out the teacher and did what I knew I needed instead. I paused between breaths. I paused and was present in the pause and then I allowed the natural flow to continue. It wasn’t holding my breath. It wasn’t forcing the matter. It was simply a conscious participation in the inevitable flow.
Let’s say it’s just like taking a moment to watch the sunrise or sunset or to experience the fuller dark and light of solstice. The world will go on at its own pace. In fact, it will go on whether I am here or not. It is experiencing its own involuntary functions of its own autonomic nervous system. I am here now, though, and my conscious participation in the inevitable flow requires pause. Pause allows perception. It allows appreciation. It allows gratitude and the finding of myself in this moment. And this one. And this.
Time goes on. Its passing is involuntary. When we are alive in it, we have it. It will affect us whether we actively, presently participate in living or not. In time we are born, we grow, we hurt, we heal, we learn, we age. When we die in it, we release any claim to it. We leave it for the living.
So, in the time that we have, shall we actively, presently participate? Shall we be grateful for the inevitability and sometimes, often, pause to appreciate? Shall we watch the sunset? The Solstice? What shall we do in between?
You are precious. Remember this. Your time is precious.