In my view, slow days and fast days aren't that much different on a basic level.
Time as a river just keeps flowing, and all I can do is flow with it.
I think it's a bit too ironic that we yearn for fast days when experiencing slow days and vice versa.
The more time passes, the more the idea of "killing time" takes root in our consciousness.
Not that I'm not a fan of do-ing, but equating be-ing with wasting time is too much of a modern tragedy.
An example is when you're quietly enjoying a cup of tea on a garden during general productivity time, and well-meaning friends or family members throw parrot popular quotes like "time waits for no man" or "Stop wasting your life away!"
Of course, I understand the dimension they're coming from. And 8 times out of 10, it's just their way of showing care, filtered through the lens of productivity-obsessed society.
What I'm trying to get at is wasting time is also a relative concept, especially in today's world, where time is meant to be consumed just as we consume everything else. Packaged, labeled, and with an expiration date.
Conscious Existence
The other day, I caught myself making a to-do list for mindful breathing exercises.
It stems from the re-realization that the more my consciousness is inside my head, the less the body breathes naturally and I literally scheduled "conscious existence" between 6:50 and 7:25 PM right around sunset.
I didn't want to carry the flavour of my day time consciousness into the night.
I have this friend who's mastered what could be called "productive procrastination." She claims she's wasting time when she's actually processing life.
As in twisting paperclips into tiny sculptures while at the same time contemplating life's big questions, for example.
Some day last week, she spent two hours organizing her sock drawer. This thing didn't really need organizing, but the repetitive motion of the process helped her untangle a complex decision about her career. Time murdered or merely transformed?
Some moments, I wonder if Thoreau's quote needs a modern re-script: From "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity..." to "As if you could save time without suffocating the present."
For me, the reasoning is that time is viewed less as a savings account now, and more like a river we swim in. Every attempt to bottle it up for later use arguably distances us from its natural flow.
Maybe, we're trying too hard to be time investment bankers when we could first try to understand time from a broader context and how it functions as a medium of existence.
It's also quite amusing to observe and ponder on how we've "turned" time – this abstract, flowing, unmeasurable essence – into something that can be killed, saved, spent, or wasted, like it's a currency in some cosmic economy. Who knows, maybe it is.
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