Winter

One winter ago, a flash freeze following a February mild spell produced the look of the lake you see in the photo. I was walking along the lakeshore near Ontario Place. It was bitterly cold. I had one thing on my mind: to get home. As I passed by the lake I was caught by its beauty and singularity, not something I’d remembered seeing before. I thought I should get a picture, but it would have meant taking off my gloves, digging out the camera, affixing a lens, setting dials. It could be risky exposing my hands and face to the cold air and the cold metal of the camera. Perhaps exposure would damage the camera. I had many reasons, good sensible reasons, to note the scene but move on.

In the end, the pesky little voice got to me: if you are a photographer then you would pay any price to capture the photo you see. The voice pressed on, moralizing that not taking the photo would be akin to a betrayal of myself, the self I think I am.

Some time, later, I held the printed photo in my hand. That experience was quite different to the experience taking the photo. The taking of the photo held risk and doubt and resistance. More out of habit, I made ready and snapped the shutter. Like the lake the day before, when taking the photo I was churning and crashing about, feeling under pressure. The image observed in the quiet of my study spoke to me of solemnity, expansiveness, surety. And there was a calmness felt along with the repose of the blue, time slowed down, even time stopped.

Time is perspective, time passing quickly, time taking forever. Perceived time is not the same as clock time. Miriam Frankel in an article Stop the clock! in the Guardian Weekly, Jan 3, 2025 presents the latest psychological and neuroscientific research on our human relationship to time. The work describes time as we experience it and time as we remember it. Interestingly, the speed and expansiveness of time can be differently felt in the moment from the memory of the moment.

The research calls for us to slow down our activity in order to find our time spent more meaningful for us and to feel better for the time spent. I’ll let you read the article for the details should you feel pressed for time, and want a different experience.

Another Guardian Weekly article for Jan 10, 2025 tackles the problem of time: Overwhelmed? Here’s How to Fix It. The article begins with the recognition that many people, pulled in many directions with many tasks are feeling overwhelmed with the physical and emotional demands of living an ordinary life. The article continues with submissions of seven Guardian writers telling what they do to cope with their time pressures. That’s followed by 15 suggestions for strategies to cope with feeling overwhelmed. The first one mentioned is to lie face down on the floor. Again, you may find something here to ease the stress of living an ordinary life.

Studies have shown that just within a few generations we are now speaking much faster than people before, eating much faster, well, doing everything at a much more hurried pace, that is normal living runs on at a much faster pace. In the past, everything took much more time. Not as efficient. But then, they weren’t always feeling overwhelmed and stretched out and bogged down. But we’re strong. We press on until we don’t.

More people are wanting to do less. The idea is that one is better for it. Productivity is the dream of the machine. Having time to oneself is one’s own dream. A family member who teaches high school physics was telling of the astronomy section he was teaching and how much content he had to get through, get done. I asked if the students had time to stare out the window and contemplate the size of the universe, its age, its order, its magnificence for themselves. What did it mean for them to live in such a universe. I only wish, he sighed. I only wish. There’s too much to get through, he said. I suppose cosmology might be taught in English or religious studies, but then those teachers have a lot to get through, too. Probably just learn the definition of cosmology, not imagine their own cosmology. No time for that.

It’s thought that having a day with nothing to do, no expectation to meet, assignment to complete, appointment to make – a whole day to sit and do absolutely nothing – well, we wouldn’t do it. We’d think it not a good use of time. And the research is indicating that we actually can’t do it. A whole day of nothing. That’s what scheduled holidays are for, though now there is internet connectivity in Algonquin Park. You don’t have to waste time doing nothing. You can watch a movie sitting by the campfire. I guess campers demanded it.

The January 3 article states that going out into nature (without WiFi) is an easy way to change time, slow it down. We fall into the rhythm of natural world. Our heartbeat syncs more to the heartbeat of the earth.

Another experience is to travel on one’s own experiencing new and exciting days. Because there is so much new in each day, the mind takes note. The day is remembered as being full and rich. That memory gives us a sense of time well spent.

Of course, one can hike along beautiful trails and listen to Spotify or take holidays full of over-the-top stimulation. But then, one isn’t really in another space, same old space, different place.

Art is another means to transport us to a different space, away from the demands pulling at us from all directions and into a space that reveals itself slowly, over time, as we spend time looking into the image where a line, a form, a texture, some little surprise we noticed only after losing ourself in the art, something to open ourself to another world, of the sense of something beneath the surface, something that reaches out, calls us to itself. That place. Another place. Where we feel our own self, being something else, being who we are. What we’ve always known about our self.

In the expansive literature on the world of imagination, Thomas Moore offers in his book Original Self that imagination appears where the rational thought and mystery meet.

If humans see themselves only as rational we find ourselves running the world. We are in control. The world is for us. Something we figure out and do with as we will. It’s where we think ourselves as immortal, become our own gods. Unfortunately history repeats how that becomes humans slaughtering other humans, taking place in many regions in our world this week. It’s humans recklessly destroying the ecosystem it needs for survival. Seems we don’t learn.

So when the rational meets mystery, students contemplating the cosmic, the rational mind learns humility. With humility comes respect, reverence and awe. We are part of something greater than ourselves. Mystery is not an unknown that we have yet to resolve. Mystery is in its nature mystery and we are most fully human -say the wise sages who pick up after the warriors who have had their way- most human when we find our place, a part of the great whole, and look to it, to the forests and the oceans and the tides and the cycles of life for our wisdom. Mystery, as we look into the frozen lake, peer into its void to see that mystery actually is the order of all. Even of ourselves. 

The experience reported from that place of reverence and awe, the response to it seems only one, a feeling of gratitude, feeling grateful to be part of this life, to know life as this, present, belonging, slowed right down to just the present, just this, belonging, one with all things, a part of all.

As the January 3 article mentions and the sages teach, we don’t have to hike into nature or go on an excursion to find our place, to feel human, living at human scale, with human wisdom, connected, fulfilled, alive, in love with life. What is needed at the core is that we pay attention to our footfalls, each step, where we step, how we step, what the air is like around us, what we see before us and above us. To walk focused on our walking, our being here.

A lot of religion is about hierarchy, about the past, about the future, about submitting and conforming. But in every religion there is a similar spiritual path of the sages and mystics, ones who peer into the abyss, who tell us we are loved, more than we can imagine, and the experience of that is felt in the quiet, the tender moment, simple. Present. That’s the trick. The numinous, the deep self -whatever name we try to give it- that place of our belonging is only felt in the present. Not in the future. Not in the past. It belongs and exists only now, where we are. Attending to our own self, in the now, is to meet the self that is who we are. That’s a teaching. A path.

The view of the frozen lake extends out to the beyond. It’s not a future that is coming, but the experience of the beyond is now. Perhaps the image teaches the way ahead, toward the unknown, immersed in the unknown, and in that the unknown becomes us. Time is slowed down. Like a lake frozen. Time becomes a longing, to live. Alive to life.

I leave you with a meditation of writer Richard Wagamese, an Anishinaabe (Ojibway) from his book Embers, p140, he writing of another kind of time.

“It’s not the big things that make me grateful and bring me joy. It’s more the glory of the small: a touch, a smile, a kind word spoken or received, that first morning hug, the sound of friends talking in our home, the quiet that surrounds prayer, the smell of sacred medicines burning, sunlight on my face, the sound of birds, and walking mindfully, each footfall planted humbly on the earth.”