Monday Mindfulness Minute: Time Flies... And That's Ok

It amazes and frustrates me how time seems to stretch or shrink depending on what I'm doing and with whom. How is it that Friday afternoon before a long weekend seems to take an eternity, while the actual weekend appears to be over in a second? Or why is it that the task we hate seems to take forever to finish, while the activity we love seems to be fleetingly short at best?

We've all heard that "Time flies when you're having fun," but why is that? More importantly, where is the fun in that? And why does it feel like such an unfair aspect of being human? Any of us, if given the chance to make our own world, would craft one where time would not speed up but would instead slow down during the good moments.

So, where does time go during the good moments? And if we are so scared and disappointed with time flying by or potentially running out of time, why do those timeless moments feel so good?

Maybe it's because joy doesn't come from timing the minutes we spend doing what we love, but from the minutes disappearing. I love the quote, "Eternity doesn't mean 'forever." Eternity means beyond time." In all the moments of joy, the mind that primarily lives in the realm of past and future somehow recedes, and we are left firmly rooted in the present. It's in the present where the clock disappears, and we are left with experiencing life unveiled by scary thoughts of running out of time or not having enough time.

It makes sense; we are afraid of losing time because it feels like we're wasting a special gift. But can we consider it lost time if we lose ourselves in the moment? Being in the moment and doing what we love is sort of like the feeling of a full belly after a satisfying meal. Would it make sense to have our bellies full and be worried that we somehow lost the food in the process? We didn't lose the food - we fully ingested the food. The same is true with time. It's not that we lose time when it disappears, we have fully ingested the life within that time and can rest in being ful-filled.

Time flying isn't a bad thing. Chase those moments when time disappears, and you'll never find yourself short of time.