Glimpse of Gratitude (4/24): I was talking to a friend yesterday, and we were talking about the chains of time (I unplugged all of the clocks in my house recently because I became so sick of seeing the time everywhere I looked, and despised the anxiety it provokes!), how it used to be the sun that told us when to rise in the morning, and so forth. We also discussed how conditioned we are to be in tune with the past and the present; meanwhile, the only thing that truly exists is the NOW, the one thing we so rarely experience fully. This transitioned into a conversation about how nature IS the embodiment of presence, FULL presence, and it teaches me how to be HERE and nowhere else. My friend later shared this thought-provoking quotation with me, which I'd like to share now with all of you: "Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” ~Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper
