Coming Home To The Timeless Zone
It’s closer than we think, in each blue sky moment between our thoughts, feelings and actions
These days I wake in the night stricken with grief and dread at the prospect of an unendurable future. Will climate catastrophe, tyranny and war engulf us all in terminal trauma? Or penetrating to a deeper and more rewarding reality, can we regain access to the everyday miracles of life — love and friendship, engagement in the natural world, pursuing our personal gifts, and more — that are available to us even in the most uncertain circumstances?
Recently I’ve become fascinated with exploring those timeless moments when one drops away from the tyranny of timekeeping and the gnawing anxieties of must-do’s, regrets and expectations. Instead, one enters into a boundless, unmediated present unburdened by the calamities of an ever more unpredictable world. These are the perennial pleasures and enduring delights to be discovered in random moments or deliberately cultivated in intimate connections with friends and fellow creatures.
These blue sky moments are not located in some distant galaxy or paranormal state of mind. They lie just on the other side of a fluttering veil of thoughts and feelings that routinely obscure the natural spaciousness of the universe. Yet it is surpassingly difficult to penetrate them to emerge free and clear like a plane ascending through dense fog into brilliant sunlight. More than every other creature, who must remain awake and alert just to survive, we humans sleepwalk in ignorance of our true natures. Driven by fears and forebodings, we’re desperate to escape the present moment that is our only true salvation.
Yet we’ve all known timeless moments and we cherish them in memory. Lying in the cradled embrace of a loved one, running free in an open field, idling an hour or afternoon away by a slow-moving river with a friend, we forget what time it is and whatever else we tell ourselves we need to do. We happen upon these moments without prior arrangement or declared purpose. They’re opportunities simply to “be.” How many “do’s” must we do before we can justify to ourselves just being? And why must we assign a functional purpose to everything we do? What makes these timeless moments so special is that they exist outside time-dependent obligations. They’re not “must-do’s” but serendipitous gifts, moments when we don’t even notice the passing of time, just the feeling of spaciousness, brief eternities.
Given how precious these moments are to us, how can we make more room for them in lives that already feel too pressured even to breathe? Paradoxically, gaining access to the timeless zone takes a certain amount of scheduling and a deliberate reallocation of our time and attention. Even for the majority of people hemmed in by the demands of work, family, and other non-negotiable obligations, we often fritter away the in-between moments that could be occasions for timelessness and rejuvenation. Here are a few strategies I’ve developed to gain access to the timeless zone:
Reduce your exposure to media: I say this as one whose profession is media. I’ve read The New York Times since before I even understood what I was reading, but I recently canceled my subscription. I find that while it’s important to remain informed it’s not necessary to track developments on a continuous basis. One can gain a clear sense of trends and developments from the ether alone without devouring time and inducing despair from ingesting the ceaseless doom loops common even in quality media. And social media, driven as they are by perverse algorithms, have become the ultimate time sink. Check out the Center for Humane Technology’s strategies to thoughtfully reduce your exposure while continuing to select the best of what’s worth your precious attention.
Reduce activities that “zone out” and instead choose those that “zone in” on spaciousness: All too many of our jobs sap our spirits, exhaust our brains, and leave us collapsed alone with our mind-numbing habit of choice in front of a cell phone, TV or computer screen. Not the best places to revive our spirits, though it may be the best to imbibe them. It’s often not that we’re so tired as that we’re tired of doing what our jobs make us do all day. Switching activities to something that gives us energy instead of stealing it reveals just how much vitality lies trapped inside us for lack of self-expression. Just about anything we do that exercises our bodies or stimulates our minds holds the potential to take us into a timeless zone, especially if it gets our hearts pumping and endorphins popping.
Slow Down and Breathe Deeply: These two elemental acts are our most direct route to eternity. Even if we do them for just five minutes at a time they offer a refreshing respite from a stale routine. Sitting still and undistracted on a park bench can feel surprisingly spacious, especially if you’re not used to listening to your inner world without the distractions of media. It can actually be uncomfortable till you get used to it. That’s one reason why we so often reach for our phones — to avoid the void we imagine would confront us in witnessing our unmediated selves. It takes a surprising measure of courage to open our ears to our inner voices. Yet on the other side of that fear lies a spaciousness we can only access if we learn to view these thoughts and feelings not as our own alone but as the sometimes turbulent weather playing out before a fathomless blue horizon.
Savor this one and only moment: “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” Einstein once observed. In a universe infinite in both space and time, everything occurs simultaneously. Our clocks and conception of time are human inventions overlaid on a boundless eternity. Pre-modern humans and indigenous peoples lived without them for thousands of years longer than the few fleeting centuries since we’ve started slicing and dicing limitless time into precise, arbitrary increments. For two decades my wife and I lived without clocks in the deep woods. We organized our days by nature’s diurnal rhythms and subtle shifts in the seasons. We kept time to the tempo of our own heartbeats and the cyclical tasks of a working homestead.
In truth we have only this moment in which to experience our existence. The less time we spend in regret and dread and dwell instead in the spaciousness of a timeless present, the more rewarding our journey will be.
