Life's Continuum

Life's Continuum

It is so important to maintain an oasis of calm within when one is leading a hectic life. If one does not know how to take things one at a time, there will be tremendous stress. For the modern man or woman, stress is the main cause of a lot of illnesses.

A poised mind does not dwell too much on the future or the past. A processor executes one instruction at a time. It does not hurry. There is no point in hurrying because one instruction is all it can do at any point in time.

You cannot do more than what you are doing now. There will always be tasks waiting in your "run queue". What you can do however, is to make your utilization of time more efficient. You strive to eliminate wastage and you find more intelligent ways of doing things. That helps a lot.

I'm thankful that despite leading a busy life, I still get to read a lot more than what an average person does. This is because I make use of those bits and pieces of time which most people would normally waste--such as time spent waiting in a queue or time spent driving or getting stuck in a traffic jam. These tiny bits of time are important; they do add up significantly.

When you have a book to read or an audiobook to listen to, time disappears. With your mind completely relaxed and happily nourished, you don't hurry unnecessarily. When you hurry, you make mistakes. And mistakes can be very costly, especially when you are driving at 100 over km/hour along the highway.

Life is a continuum of experiences--not point events separated by intervals of unimportance. Your workday is not defined by a series of events, it is instead a continuous flow of mental and sensory experiences, which you, in your ignorance, conveniently lump into "chunks"--"my project meeting", "that important customer presentation", "my appointment with dentist" etc.

When you think of life in terms of events, you tend to treat the intervals between them as unimportant. That's why you hear the expression: "killing time". Those tiny bits of time between important events are to be "killed". But why kill time? Remember: your lifetime is finite. To kill time is to kill yourself.

Why not experience time as an ever-present flow?. Like a fountain that is replenished by a steady stream of fresh water particles, but yet maintains a steady shape. You don't try to chase time. You allow it to flow into your life, allowing it to bring forth the fullness and essence that is in every moment.

Life is a continuum. You don't selectively lump a series of events together and label them "happy" or "sad". These so-called "defining moments" are not your life. Your life is not something you've achieved in the past or something that is yet to come in the future. Life is now. The ever-present Now. It is all that matters, it is all there is and ever will be.