We learn about time from those who know they have little time left.
Mary was the first patient in my unforgettable years as a hospice volunteer. According to official medical script, she overstayed her visit, living well beyond the prescribed six months. Months after she, her devoted husband, George, and I celebrated our second Christmas and New Year's together, from her bedside she pointed to the exquisite white rose on her window sill and whispered, "The rose comes back. Why wouldn't I?"
There is no greater mystery than that of time and our relationship to it.
What is it? What does it mean to spend it? To save it? To waste it? Mary's words always ring inside of me its immeasurable truth. We do not live in time. We live as time. We live time, and time lives us.
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The 13th-century Zen Buddhist Dogen captured this with his notion of uji, or "being time" in his classic Shobogenzo. Uji stresses the inseparability of ourselves and time. Time has no being outside of us.
As Xavier University ethics scholar David Loy writes, time "manifests itself as the temporal processes we experience as objects," like the rose. Cyclical, time's moments embrace past and future.
One major mistake we can easily make lies in thinking of time as existing apart from us. We then believe that time is linear, an inhospitable arrow marking our beginnings, in-betweens, and ends, so that speed becomes addictive. Thus our compulsive coping with time. "Never enough time." Remember Gulliver? He was so attached to his watch, his "oracle," that Lilliputians thought it was his god.
Hence our public malady — the disease of Rush. We rush when we drive, work, talk, think, walk, eat and exercise.
My headstone might read: "He worked hard and often rushed to make his deadlines, except this one."
Are we really living as we sprint to the next stoplight?
Clock time is a constant. Therefore, the more projects we crowd into that constant, the less time we have to actually do them. And the less time to do them, the more time "flies."
Consider the elevator — that confined setting which illustrates our cultural malaise. On our collective elevators, we feverishly press the most popular button, Door Close. That, by the way, as James Gleick points out in his book "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything," is more often a placebo, disengaged though still tendering the illusion of control.
Gratefully there are exceptions. About an hour before speaking recently at a hospital in Lincoln, Neb., I rushed half a football field down the hotel lobby to catch the elevator. Nebraskans inside spotted me, pressed Door Open, and in their red and white Cornhuskers jerseys, bid me a warm "Good morning." There's hope.
For most of us, however, caught up in the speeding train, we uncritically submit to and offer unbridled faith in the dogma "Faster is better." Even our kids can be brainwashed, as in AT&T's television commercial. Pity anyone who moves slowly like Grandma.
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Is there a way to turn the tables on our rush?
It lies in learning the art of the pause, and music is the clue. My childhood piano teacher Miss Nason once told me that of all musical notation, the most important was the one you don't play — the rest, the symbol for pause, sometimes brief, sometimes prolonged.
Without the rest, like spaces between notes, no note makes sense. Without pause, there is no music, only rushed cacophony. Its pauses carve out music's soul.
Our journey's symphony only becomes real when we pause, slow down, and rest. Our pauses allow my music to return to itself, just like Mary's rose. Its death allows it to return. Though dying, Mary was very much alive.
Michael Brannigan is the Pfaff Endowed Chair in Ethics and Moral Values at The College of Saint Rose. His email address is michael.brannigan@strose.edu.