Time is the Mark of Subtle Changes

There is something graceful in opportunities that come with new demands and unexpected challenges. Opportunities to notice something new in the often overly familiar. Mother Theresa once said, “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” 

We gain nothing in wishing that the now we have been given, with all of its turmoil and pandemic uncertainties, could be somehow different than it is. This now is all we have with which to work. And as the given moment, it is like no other in all of creation — unique and priceless in infinite possibilities. In it we take our place and we begin. Step, shift, settle, ground, again.

Discover graceful opportunity in T’ai Chi Chih practice by embracing the now in which we live, breathe and have our being. With each step, position, shift and settling we move through this moment with purposeful intention, a requisite of our practice.

Justin once said that time is an illusion. Yet, as we move through our practice and experience the continual soft change of our weight shifts and returns, we mark the subtle pressure against the soles of our feet moving across the foundation and sense that there is something new in the familiar of every shift. Something has changed. And with attentiveness we mark that change. And isn’t time after all marked by those subtle changes, like the clicks and groans on some wall devise? It is only in the changes that we notice one moment from another. Only by the changes that occur in motion do we sense something we call “time.” Perhaps that is why time is so relative to where we stand in the midst of life.

Mark the little changes … as you feel your weight shift to the left as you carry the ball; as the sun’s light shifts gradually across the lawn; as the curtains flutter in an afternoon breeze; as the laughter builds then fades following a casual remark; as the stiffness of scars remind us there was a past; as the heart lightens when once there was little light of hope; as the skin carries new marks and creases from past expressions. So many subtle shifts that mark one moment from the next, all reminding us of how this moment is thick with moments past.

Time is something we encounter in the gentle shifting around our core across the expanse of our stance. Something expands and returns. Breath eases out naturally into another stance. It is seen only in the marking of life’s balance, shifting and re-establishing, noticed essentially in our attentiveness to the bubbling springs. It is as if time doesn’t exist at all and yet has always been there, marked by each of our life’s moments from the very beginning of…well, time.