Fear at the edge

I’ve been noticing that (I suspect unlike some of the other participants in this program) I haven’t maintained a strong enough meditation practice to deeply experience what it’s like to inhabit time in a new way: to explore the margins of the present, and to feel time running through and uniting all aspects of my aliveness.  At the same time, grappling with the difficult material in this book has often been its own reward.  Glimpses of how things really are illuminate the terrain, even if it doesn’t transform it.  This morning I read a sentence in this week’s reading that strongly reminded me of an earlier time in my life (one during which my sense of time WAS transformed).  “If we find ourselves trapped in the prerecorded, how can we renew our contact with times’s dynamic?”  I was in Calgary at the end of a summer during which I had worked on farms and ranches.  I had left Montreal in fear and trembling, my life there seeming to have run out of any kind of tolerable future.  Now the harvest seemed to have ended on the Canadian wheat farms and ranches.  Suddenly I felt I had no future wherever I looked.  I was on the edge of the future and it shook me deeply.  Then something shifted.  I hit some kind of bottom in which I could see that this is what I had yearned for: A future not locked into a prerecorded, endlessly repeated parade of false and lifeless gestures.  I left my room and within 24 hours had been offered three jobs: loading a truck, dismantling the rides at the end of the Calvary Stampede, and helping a man erect balconies on new apartments.  I wonder if transformations that happen when we are the edge of our lives have any lessons for the other times.  If so, I wonder whether my difficulty in inhabiting the edges of the present now contains an element of fear for me: do I really want to challenge the way I live and step into a more vital, living medium of time? — Michael