Time and Time Again

playing in the class...bottom right is made with cling wrap.
The bottom two are on ceramic tile and the top two on Yupo Paper.  

alcohol inks...blown flower on yupo paper

Time, and time again…

When friend Autumn recently commented on how I must have 30 hours in my days rather than the 24 she seems to have been allotted, it made me smile and give that some thought.  

I swear that synchronicity is at play in my life all the time now.  Things people say and do and read just seem to be in some sort of connection through a parallel universe.  I have spent the better part of the the summer in a kind of revelation of time and it’s relationship to me.  

It may have a lot to do with my approaching 80th birthday because I know that everything is tied to everything else in my world and what seemed endless time is certainly now finite time.  Which it is for all of us, it’s just that older people get it.    

  

I began wondering if my fascination with Steam Punk is also part of the whole picture.  Steam Punk revolves around a fascination with a fantasy world set in another time period and often features clocks. And for me…all summer long, one thing seems to lead to another. And they all seem interrelated around the theme of the management of “time”.  

I started out by reading a book recommended by my daughter Julie…Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss.  An innocent foray into the idea that everything that happens to you is worth noting and chance encounters and everyday decisions can and do change your life.  And if you are “fine tuned” you can really interpret some of the symbolic things that you come across in the commonest of events.  You can, if you practice, catch messages and receive gifts that seem almost enchanted.  It’s a lovely example of living beyond the ordinary.  So I began to sort of “tune up” to notice things a bit more.  

So then that led to another book that came my daughters’ way and it seemed to fit into my life in another magical way: Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life by Marney Makridakis. (It’s been around for 7 years so you can find used copies inexpensively.). Marney’s advice for slowing down time:

1. Create “focused” time.  Focus on one thing.  Sounds just like me teaching Zentangle®, doesn’t it?
2. Focus on Segments rather than wholeness.  As my friend Cynthia said during her husbands stressful summer…”one step at time got me through”.  
3. Create time wraps.  Visualize yourself “wrapping” up a bundle of time to do the things that you need and want.  Hold that sacred. 
4. Slow down.  Hurrying is an inclination for folks who don’t have time.  Or think they don’t.  Move intentionally and act deliberately. I don’t know how it works but it does.
5. Give yourself “circular time”.  Not linear time.
6. Use all your senses more deeply.
7. Notice EVERYTHING happening.  Seen in small segments you get more aligned with life that way.
8. Mental Snapshots…Slow down your mind’s camera.
9. Have high awareness time―I laugh..in this point the author says “spend time with babies and the elderly” this will sharpen your sense of the life-cycle.  SO true.
10. View your time as a “resource” and allocate a piece of it to things you need and want to do. Like tithing.  

Tie this together my love of poet Mary Oliver whose main gift to the world was an assessment of how to live your life so your soul can live in the moment.  And I find things just dropping into my world about the way to make time be more than time.  

So that’s how to get 30 hours out of 24. 

Ginny

Ps, Oh and in honor of serendipity again…I am reading a book by Alan Alda now called Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself.  I quote: 

“I think we don’t realize how important time is. When we couldn’t communicate at the speed of light, we probably didn’t think about it much.  But things do take time. Chemical reactions take time.  Mourning a loss takes time. In fact, all transitions in our lives take time.  Getting in shape, physically or mentally takes more than a weekend, no matter what they tell you in the brochure.”

You see what I mean…it’s all connected.