How I enjoyed taking a “TSK walk” at work again! Time was resonant for me on the walk, as I felt my contemplative steps around the building kicked up not only fallen leaves, but memories of many past such walks during previous TSK courses. One way I felt the dimensionality of time play in my walk this afternoon was as a play of already/never: There was the trace of past walks limning this present circumambulation (the “already”), but while this walk was like those other walks, it was also unique, a new bubble of experience that could not be reduced to any of those other times (the “never before”). On the one hand, there is nothing particularly remarkable about this, but on the other, it was sort of a new experience to see that the sense of “already” is (by virtue of time’s dynamic) never what it seems — that in one way, there is no “already.” I related this to Jack’s/Rinpoche’s suggestion that moments may not have anything (directly, linearly) to do with other moments that “precede” them. This moment appears whole, with a frothy surface of events breaking on the edge of “not yet,” and a depth that recedes back into an expanding cone of “what came before,” but in this view, the what came before can be seen as “just as new” as this arriving moment.
How does this strike you? How does time “play” for you today?
Wow! Love the post, love the comment! Nice job both of you. Thank you.
David
(this is a comment from Michael Gray)
Good morning, Bruce. It’s a different day today than the day in which I first read your post–that would be yesterday from the prespective of today. And since I do not have the temporal resources to read your post tomorrow, although that might be a good time to read it, today will have to do. It’s always pleasant to read how someone is enjoying the moment, remembering the past in ways that sound like an Alice in Wonderland Tea Party where all the memories, expectations, and comtemplative views of the now, the then, and the eventual are invited in to enjoy the frothy exuberance of a larger, more inclusive, and more integrated time. From this neck of the woods (I guess that is already a rather constrictive view of time), I find the trees rising up before me and the forest is a rumor of another lifetime. Perhaps I can add an awareness of my own heart, beating down the doors of isolation and dislocation, as I move through the routines that beckon me now–getting myself and other family members ready for our days, which will have vanished before I know it. –Michael