The Effort to Be in Time

“Hungry Paul was good at this: just sitting, not fidgeting, not thinking particularly, and simply listening to the room. He never minded time. It neither dragged nor slipped away for him. He always felt in time. Just here, just being around.”    -Leonard and Hungry Paul, Rónán Hession

This sentence is probably the best description of mindfulness that comes out in a novel. As somebody who is always dogged by a feeling that time is slipping away or must be used productively, I have to acknowledge that I am probably the opposite of this character. Embarrassingly, it means that I fail to truly embody mindfulness despite the huge space that mindfulness and meditation practices occupy in my life and my enjoyment of reading and ruminating about them. I don’t think that “being in time,” which is a beautiful description of a state of being in its simplicity (the simplicity of both the state of being and of the actual sentence), comes naturally to me. I am a perennial do-er and internal fidgeter. Meditation was a tool and a life-altering insight to me at first. It lifted me out of a numb mental health abyss and mindfulness taught me to recognize the beauty of the day-to-day world around me and the joy of concentrating on one thing at a time. Now this practice and philosophy seem like essential ingredients to continuing the way of life I’ve adopted, but I recognize that even now, they are not my default state. 

Luckily, it doesn’t take tremendous struggle to come back to an awareness of the moment and I know that that type of mindset is also not out of reach. I am neither scared of it nor anxious about my proficiency in it. It is not an obtrusive guest. I do have to be jolted sometimes though to bringing it back to myself, either through books, art, nature, or just spoken words, unexpectedly heard. If we shift our wandering mind to be in time, is that truly being in time? I am not sure. However, I also avoid the glamorization of effortlessness because it is less common than the world might convince us to believe. Most changes or maintenance of a habit require effort. An effort to come back to a mindful state everyday is a worthy aspiration for even those most daunted by it.