Untitiled 47

A lot of the work I do on myself, in myself, is about get­ting unstuck. Attach­ments. I am attached to you. That sounds innocu­ous. But then I get stuck, sticky, fused even. I lose myself a lit­tle. I have real­ized that my deep­est attach­ment is to time. I am jeal­ous of it, can‘t stand to be with­out it. My attach­ment to time leads to all the worry about the end of (my) time. I try to hoard it, which is like try­ing to make a fist around a palm full of water.

When I work with patients who are dying, I some­times see them let go of this deep­est of attach­ments. Then they become serene, all the way down. Their lin­ear under­stand­ing of them­selves dis­solves and washes away. It turns into an oceanic aware­ness of them­selves and the world. They hop off the one-way train tracks and are every­where at once. Mostly they are in themselves.

Free of time is very dif­fer­ent than free time. I don‘t have a lot of either, but I spend time try­ing to find the lat­ter and miss­ing the chances at embrac­ing the for­mer. I wring my hands about the inex­orable tick tock, not overtly or even con­sciously, but I do it. I even worry about the time that has (appar­ently) passed. I say appar­ently because when I see my time-free patients they are not only free of the future time but also of the past-time. They teach me that the present is the gift. The other experts at this of course, are kid­dos, but they are the unknow­ing per­fect mod­els. The ones who get there in spite of hav­ing been on the train for a while are my heroes.

The present is the gift.