Millenial Reflections by JJ Gormley
If there's anything we all can agree upon, it's that there never seem to be enough hours in a day. And with a proverbial blink of the eye, the millennial celebration—however artificial—will be upon us. It might therefore be useful to reflect on the accelerating passage of time.
Walk into any bookstore and chances are you'll find twenty or more books on time management. But with the millennial change around the corner, slightly more philosophical treatments of time have become fashionable. One such bestseller is James Gleick's Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.
In a very quick read, Gleick delivers a series of short vignettes on everything from time-saving gadgets and 500 channel cable TV to "instant" replay, coffee, gratification, and food, all to show how intensely we live, compressing more and more work, travel, and entertainment into a finite period of time.
Most of us want to live intensely, if for no other reason than to sample just a few of the appealing choices modern technology makes available to us. Yet, we frequently wax nostalgic about the good old days when life was simpler. But, as Gleick notes, life was hardly easy for most people 100 or even 25 years ago, when mundane work tasks and bowing to necessity defined one's day. So, the acceleration of just about everything furnishes an adrenaline rush of choice that many of us frankly thrive upon.
Just as commonly, though, we fret about having so much to do and so little time to do it in. We haven't fully explored the consequences of what Microsoft's Bill Gates calls a world that "operates in 5-minute segments." We haven't thought through the implications of becoming masters of "multi-tasking," or having the ability to do several things at once or in short sequential order. I think the fret we experience flows from the numbing mindlessness which accompanies the acceleration of just about everything.
Our challenge is to exercise free will when we decide what we choose to do each day. What separates the ordinary from the extraordinary human being is the latter's ability to concentrate on a task or life quest. To concentrate on something means to fully embrace it. Remember, we choose to do absolutely everything we do. With the exception of an unfortunate calamity, the things we pile up on ourselves come through our own choosing.
Concentration implies temporarily forgetting everything else. A profound treatment of this facet of time can be found in Robert Grudin's Time and the Art of Living, where Grudin eloquently captures the mystery of achievement. Grudin writes that one's goals "seem to be won less by intensity than by integrity, less by aggressive assaults than by concentration indefinitely and heroically prolonged in time . . . Preeminent individuals, whatever their attitude toward instants and moments exist more in the larger chambers and outdoor stretches of time than in its fractions and compartments." Extraordinary human beings have the ability to see the larger picture without losing focus on the things that capture their most passionate and enduring attention. They are able to avoid mindlessly going from one frantic activity—however pleasurable it may seem—to another.
All this, you might say, is easier said than done. But there are ways to harness our mind's enormous capacity to concentrate on what we wish to emphasize most in life. Yoga, pranayama, and meditation each contributes to helping us exist more in the larger chambers than in time's fractions and compartments. The very nature of yoga entails leaving distractions behind and fully being with your breath and in your body. You learn to pay attention to what your body is doing and feeling in each pose. Learning to inhabit our bodies is the first step in reigning in the mind and training it to focus. Yoga is like going back to school and having to pay attention, only this time the attention is exclusively personal and intensely inward.
When we first begin yoga, most of us experience being cut off from our bodies. We perceive life largely in our heads while our bodies seem like disconnected objects that manage to get us from place to place. We exercise them and when something goes wrong we see a doctor or other professional. Yoga commences a journey toward connecting the head to the rest of our body in a most profound way. We begin to see who we are in this unfamiliar vessel. Instead of mindlessly running from activity to activity wondering how we could possibly get everything done, we start to embrace who we are and why we have chosen to do what we do. Once we know who we are, the rest is fairly simple and by comparison straightforward.
So, life in the 21st century fast lane is only destined to become faster. What you choose to do in this ever-accelerating environment of more and more choices is fully up to you. As far as I'm concerned, I plan to embrace life in all its wonderful diversity.