Have you noticed that people who are vibrant and enthusiastic about life don’t seem to age, and those who fret and worry a lot, look older than their years? When you are happy, when you feel light, the sense of time vanishes. It doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t touch you in the least. You are so natural and spontaneous.
When you meet someone after many years, you exclaim, “You have changed so much!” little realising that you have also changed as much yourself.
We relate to time based on events. The more involved we are with events in our day-to-day life, the more we need to fragment time. Nature divides the day in two parts, day and night. Our whole life revolves around them. The concept of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds were invented by man to aid us, but unfortunately we have become imprisoned by them. We prioritise our life based on these compartments giving different meaning to them. Today the clock rules our life.
How time flies when we are happy! And how slowly it chugs along when we are sad! Think about how you feel when you wake up on a Sunday morning compared to a Monday morning. Isn’t there a difference in your state of mind? Think about how time passes when you are on vacation. Doesn’t the passing of time seem longer when you are at work? Time seems to pass quickly when we enjoy what we are doing and seems to slow down when we are uninterested in what we do.
We have become so conditioned in our concept of time. From the time we were born, our birth date was recorded and each year we have celebrated our physical arrival on this earth. The concept of time evolved in our minds, and became the basis of the way we lead our lives.
We humans have the tendency to hold on to the past. We constantly use our phone cameras to capture moments we find important, and share these on social media. When we go on holidays or to places of scenic beauty, we first reach for our cameras. We try to capture the experience of being there on film rather than actually having the experience.
What questions do we commonly ask each other when we meet someone for the first time? Often, we ask questions to gauge the person’s age. If they are studying, we slot them into a certain time frame in relation to ourselves. If they are married, or have grandchildren, then we slot them into another time frame. We treat people as older, younger or equal in age to us. Notice how much of our identity is attached to these concepts. We find these essential when trying to relate to each other.
When we get caught up in these concepts, we get trapped in rigid compartments of time. This leads to worry and tension that eventually ruin our health. Today, we rush from event to event. Appointments have become routine, even for leisure activities. Getting to parties and movies on time gives us stress, rather than relaxing us.
The Sanskrit word for health is ‘swastha’ which means to be established in oneself. Whenever we move away from our centre we become ‘Aswastha’, and we gravitate towards ill-health. Thus, the more in touch we are with ourselves, the less we are ruled by time.
The essence of who we are is timeless, expansive, unbounded. We experience this when we meditate. We go beyond the mind and body.
Thoughts subside; mind stops and dissolves into the infinite. In meditation we experience that we are not this body. We understand that we are ageless, beyond time, beyond space.
The writer is the author of The Millennial Yogi, Penguin Random House India. He is on Instagram @deepam.chatterjee