If you are at any stage in your life preceding what you may describe as achieving your ultimate goal or total fulfilled immersion in your passion, I think that there’s a fairly good chance that at some point during your working hours you feel yourself having trouble passing the time. The clock begins to slow to a crawl, and while the time begins to slow like molasses, your mind starts to race and speed up, beginning to mimic a swarm of anxious particles trapped in a cage.
Hopefully this is not how you feel at work all of the time, but if it is, try to think about the times when time actually passes quickly? What is different than when you are mired in the cosmic sludgery of time? For me it’s generally when I am engaged, concentrated, or most simply in the moment. Certainly this term has been used almost to the point of total dilution by now, but it still hasn’t lost its power. It can be described as presence, mindfulness, and some would say “Flow state” (though I think this generally refers to a subtly different state)
stuck in dat sludge
As a music teacher, many of my younger students seem to get mired in the cosmic muck of eternal drudgery after about 10-15 minutes of semi-focused work. Then begin the pleading inquiries of “How much time do we have leffftttt mr. ericcccccc”, to which my stock answer is
“1000 minutes”. Being that they generally don’t know how to tell time or read a clock this puts them at somewhat of a disadvantage. But of course, if they concentrate on their playing, the time simply flies by, because they are engaged and focused. It’s amazing to watch them slowly come to this realization over the course of a lesson (only to have them totally forget it by the next time I see them) and see how fast time goes by.
Of course I have my own struggles with this as sometimes lessons feel so damn boring that I want to jump out a window, but having some modicum of a concentration practice generally goes a long way towards making the time pass. And in a deeper sense, I don’t want to just pass the time, I want to be as fully present and compassionate with the being In front of me that I am endeavoring to teach, which as a nifty side effect of passing time.
So next time you are mired in the vast expanse of cosmic sludgeitude, try focusing your attention on even the tiniest details wherever your are, The texture of the floor, the colour of the wall, anything. I find this will generally center me and help me get back into the flow of life!