With Daylight Savings a twice a year event, I have been thinking about how much of our lives are spent trying to manage and often manipulate something that doesn’t really exist. We invented time by placing numbers on a calendar and then by placing them on the face of a man made device called a clock which then aides us in maintaining our lives in a linear fashion based on the three "tenses"; past, present, and future. The universe knows nothing about time--it is we who created and live our lives around time, which, no pun intended, makes us "tense" much of the time.
Someone once said, "Time is God's way of keeping everything from happening at once." The past and the future don’t exist because it is always Now--the reality is that everything IS happening at once. Think about it! Take a moment and consider where you "think" you were on a specific day in time ten or twenty years ago. Notice that as you conjure up that memory it is happening in your mind Now. Even back then, it was Now. The same goes for what you may consider to be your future--as you image it in your mind, it is happening Now...and when you arrive there it will also be Now. Seems you can’t ever get away from Now.
While Daylight Savings time may allow us to better maximize the daylight hours, be it for work or play, regardless of the position of the sun and earth, it doesn’t add anything to Now. It is a classic example of how we allow the clock to instantly cast us, sixty man-made-minutes, into the future or the past, magically adding or deducting something to or from our lives that doesn’t really exist--time. In short, the moment we look to the clock it pulls us out of the present moment, which is where life is always waiting for us to be available for that mystical experience of knowing our oneness with the All that is.
Time really is the reef upon which our mystic sailing ship gets caught. So, as you adjust the clocks in your home, car, office, or your watch, on that Saturday night in the Spring and the Fall, try to become the silent witness of how, no matter how you may be able to manipulate the hands on a clock, you can’t change something that doesn’t really exist. "Spring ahead or Fall back"...Really? Setting your clock doesn’t change time--it only changes your perception of a changeless reality. Enjoy this present moment because, irrespective of what the numbers on your clock may say, Now is all you will ever have--make every holy instant of it count.
