Too Quickly

Six thirty-six a.m. was the precise earth time of my arrival. Under the beguiling guise of being a child, I managed to stay on bio-cosmic time for at least three earth years. But my keepers (my touchers, feeders, huggers, protectors) worried very hard to teach me tick-tock time. To relax their frowns and tight lips into smiles, I learned to get up, eat meals, be home, and be asleep before the long hand and the short hand got around to numbers my scowl-masters mysteriously chose.

For a little while, I swung like a pendulum between trying to kill time and make time. These were trying times, for time was everywhere I spoke. Just a second. Have you got a moment? It’ll only take a minute, every hour on the hour, day in and day out. So take your own sweet time because I’ve got time on my hands.

Then once upon …a time, I awoke from my nightly nap, 40 tick-tock years old. Head time had changed. Weeks had become days, months had become weeks, and years — months. While my son was cleaning his magic slate of a mind with eight to ten hours of digital duration, I merely had to blink and the sun would reappear as yesterday’s worried awareness played on.

More recently I wondered whether this brief, real life episode was being sponsored and videotaped by God/Buddha/Whomever. At first I anticipated my life would take several videocassettes to record, perhaps enough for a week long serial to amuse the gods. But how much tape would it take to record my nightly blinks? Perhaps as each thought expands, loses the illusion of distinct parts and moments, it captures more and more earth time within it. Eventually there will be but one photograph of this moment of consciousness, of this life. And after I’ve collected several of these life-times into my scrap book, I’ll take them to my Teacher in amazement of how many lives it took me to wake up.

– Evan B. Hammond