THE NEWTONIAN TIME TRAP IN DETAIL
The Newtonian paradigm guarantees that you will always have a problem with time. You’ll either have too little of it or too much. You’ll either have “no time at all” or be sitting around with “time on your hands.” You’ll be rushing to catch up or bored out of your wits. In the Newtonian world, we’re either “running out of time” or watching the seconds creep by. Think of how many times in your life you’ve heard someone say, “I have exactly the right amount of time to enjoy everything I’m doing.” I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anybody say anything like that. Most people seem to live at the two extremes of the time continuum: rushing to stay ahead of the clock because they’re busy, or virtually brain-dead with boredom because they don’t have enough to do.
At the heart of the Newtonian time crunch is a dualistic split: we are deluded into thinking that time is “out there,” an actual physical entity that can put pressure on us “in here.” That’s ridiculous, of course, but try to tell that to a patient in a cardiologist’s office. As Meyer Friedman, MD, pointed out in his classic book, Type A Behavior and Your Heart, typical heart patients have a marked sense of time urgency. They’re in a race with time, and their hearts show the wear and tear of it.
Newtonian dualism pits us against time. In this paradigm, we think of time as the master and us as its slave. At the extreme, time becomes our persecutor, and we think of ourselves as its victim. Since time feels like an ever-present entity hovering in the background of our lives, we come to feel that we’re victims of an entity that’s always there, all the time. Such a view is dangerous to our health, disastrous for our business, and ruinous to our relationships with family and friends. That’s why I urge you to adopt Einstein Time. Not only is it a new paradigm; it can literally be a lifesaver.
OUR TIME PROBLEM: A SPACE PROBLEM
To get to the new, expanded version of time offered by Einstein, we also need to make a few changes in how we think about space. When we’re running on Einstein Time, our experience of time changes because we make a fundamental change in how much space we are willing to occupy. By learning to occupy space in a new way, we actually gain the ability to generate more time.
Here’s a practical example. Recall Einstein’s colloquial explanation of relativity: an hour with your beloved feels like a minute; a minute on a hot stove feels like an hour. This example has everything you need to understand Einstein Time and its powerful positive ramifications for how we live our lives. If you are forced to sit on a hot stove, you become preoccupied with trying not to occupy the space you’re in. You withdraw your consciousness toward your core, contracting away from the pain of contact with the stove. The act of contracting your awareness away from space makes time congeal. It seems to slow down and harden into a solid mass. The more you cringe from the pain, the slower time gets.
When you’re embracing your beloved, though, your awareness flows in the opposite direction, toward space. When you’re with your beloved, every cell in your body yearns to be in union with him or her. Your awareness flows out toward your periphery. You want to occupy every possible smidgen of space in the yearned-for present. When you’re in love, you relax into the space around you and in you, and as your consciousness expands into space, time disappears. If you even remember to glance at a clock, you notice that time has leaped forward in great spurts. Entire hours can disappear in the wink of an eye. When your heart is beating in time with your beloved’s, your every cell is reaching out for total union. You forget about time. When you’re willing to occupy all space, time simply disappears. You’re everywhere all at once, there’s no place to get to, and everywhere you are it’s exactly the right time.
Now, back to the stove. I hope it’s been a long time since you’ve sat on one, so let’s use an example that’s much more relevant to your daily life. Let’s say you notice that your belly muscles are particularly tight on a given morning. You’re busy, though, so you don’t stop to find out why your stomach’s so tight. In other words, you choose not to occupy the space of your tense belly by shining the light of awareness on it. You ignore it and hurry on. This is a costly moment, though, because by choosing not to become aware of why your belly muscles are so tight, you sentence yourself to a daylong battle with time.
Specifically, let’s say your belly is tight because you’re scared. Let’s say you’re scared about a visit from your daughter—as recently happened to a friend of mine. He’s a single dad whose wife died from cancer several years ago, leaving him with three teenage daughters to raise on his own. Here’s the story he told me.
About 9 a.m. I was sitting at my desk working on an article I needed to finish that day. The phone rang; it was my nineteen-year-old daughter, Sara, calling from a phone booth. She said she was on her way home from her college, a six-hour drive away. She told me she needed to talk to me about something important…too important to talk about on the phone. My belly clenched into a tight fist when I heard that. I begged her to give me a hint, but she simply said she’d see me in the afternoon. She hung up without even saying good-bye. The conversation was so unlike our usual way of communicating that I was dumbfounded. I actually stood there staring at the phone in my hand for a long moment before I remembered to hang it up. Then I entered a time tunnel for the next six hours. I must have looked at the clock a thousand times. I would try to concentrate on my article, but my mind would wander back to the conversation. Sara had always been the “responsible one,” so my mind was jumping through hoops trying to imagine what was going on. Was she pregnant? Had she caught some dread disease? By 3 p.m. my mind felt like it was on the high-speed setting of a Cuisinart. Finally Sara walked in, and I said, “Where have you been?” She said she’d stopped for lunch and the restaurant had been jammed. “Lunch?” I croaked. The idea of eating during the past seven hours had been unthinkable to me. What had brought her home? She told me that halfway through her school year the full force of grief about her mother’s death had descended upon her. She found she didn’t want to be there. She wanted to postpone school until the following year, get a temporary job, maybe do some traveling that summer. She was deeply worried that I would feel disappointment and disapproval. She wanted to be able to see my face when she talked to me about the issue. Ten minutes later we were laughing and crying together, best friends again.
He told me that before she walked in the door, time had seemed “slow as molasses.” The minutes crept by, as they will when you look at the clock often. His creative energy disappeared also. No matter how much he tried to busy himself with his work, his mind kept returning to the knot in his belly and the worries in his mind. Suddenly, though, when Sara shared her dilemma and her desires, time took on a different characteristic. An hour or two flew by as they talked about their feelings about her quitting college. Here’s the real Einsteinian magic at work, though: when he sat back down to work on his article, his fingers flew over the keyboard, and he finished his project in less than hour. He thought it would take all day to write it, but instead it took a fraction of that time.
THE TRUTH ABOUT TIME AND ALL THE THINGS YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO DO
You’ll never have enough money to buy all the stuff you don’t really need, and you’ll never have enough time to do all the things you really don’t want to do. Our Newtonian concept of both time and money is built on scarcity. The advertising industry thrives on the fact that they know this and most of us don’t. Advertising encourages us to want a lot of things we don’t really need. It also encourages us to want to do a lot of things we don’t really want to do. All those problems disappear on Einstein Time.
To get on Einstein Time, you have to make one big shift, and it’s so unthinkable that I’ve actually heard grown-ups gasp in astonishment when I’ve suggested they do it. It involves taking full ownership of time. It’s such a bold step that very few people have the courage to take it. I’m betting you’re one of those few, though.
Stay with me here. The concept is
so unusual that it can’t be understood in the usual way. We have to peel off layers of old, erroneous programming in order get to the elegant, simple truth of it. One layer that needs to be peeled off is your time persona.
“PARDON ME, MAY I BORROW YOUR PERSONA FOR A MOMENT?”
Part of our problem with time is related to the persona we have. A persona is a pattern of actions and feelings that came into being at a certain time in our lives, in response to certain conditions. Persona, a Latin word that means “mask,” is the root of our more familiar word personality. Think back on the different personas you saw around you in your family of origin. The same family can produce one child who wears a Rebel persona, another child with a Mom’s Helper persona, and a third with a Class Clown persona. Where and how these personas form is one of the great mysteries that the field of psychology tries to solve. We’re going to leave that mystery for the academics, though. Here I want to focus only on the most practical aspect of personas.
WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR PERSONA
Everybody’s got at least one persona, and most of us have two or three we wear for different occasions. Here’s the quirky truth that gets overlooked: most of us probably don’t realize that the persona we’re wearing is actually a persona. For example, if you’ve been wearing a Shy Kid persona since you were in kindergarten, as an adult you may actually think you’re shy. You may not realize that it’s like a suit you put on early in life and have been wearing so long you think it’s your skin.
Part of becoming a grown-up is learning to spot when we’re operating out of a persona. Part of growing up is discarding the personas that aren’t contributing to our happiness and success in life. The Rebel may wake up at age twenty-five and realize that the same amount of effort it takes to rebel against authority can be rechanneled into getting positive attention from authorities. I know. I’m one of them. I got in trouble a lot in high school, college, and elsewhere (often for the antics of my Class Clown persona). I realized in my twenties that much of my Rebel persona came from trying to get attention from male authority figures. I’d grown up without a father, and I believe I hid my grief about that issue under a layer of anger. I took an upside-down approach in my interactions with authority, getting the attention I craved through misbehavior rather than positive contributions. It worked out OK in the long run, because I woke up in time to turn the Rebel energy into creative energy.
Time personas work the same way. Most of us adopt a persona in regard to time, and then we forget it’s a persona. We lose sight of the fact that we can take it on and off; it becomes ingrained and semipermanent. Let me give you two examples of time personas from opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end there’s the Time Cop, who gets there on time and reminds others to do the same. The Time Cop gets frustrated because people don’t show up on time, and gets particularly furious with those folks at the other end of the spectrum, the Time Slackers. If you wear the Time Slacker persona, you’re always getting hassled for being late or not showing up at all. If you’re a Time Cop, you’re often hassling people for not keeping their time agreements.
I will insert a forthright confession here: I’m a Time Cop. This persona has softened a little bit as I’ve matured, but once a Time Cop, always a Time Cop. I expect that this persona will be with me until my last breath (which will be on time, I can assure you).
I had an employee for a while who was a classic Time Slacker. Wherever she was supposed to be, she was always a little late. Most of the time it didn’t cause problems, because her duties around the office were not usually time-sensitive. One time, however, it caused a problem. Her sole duty on a particular day was to pick me up at the airport at a certain time. I got to the curb outside the airport, where she had assured me she would be, and she wasn’t there. This was in the era before cell phones were common, so I had no way to find out if she was on her way or had forgotten about it completely. I waited around for a few minutes in the cold, then gave up and got a cab.
Back at the office an hour later she came in and glared at me. “Where were you?” she asked. “I waited at the airport for half an hour!” I could hardly believe my ears. “Where were you?” I asked. “I stood around waiting for ten minutes, then took a twenty-five-dollar cab ride home.” She gave me a classic Time Slacker answer. “I was only fifteen minutes late,” she said, delivering this line with a tone of exasperated victimhood. I asked her, “How was I supposed to know you were only going to be fifteen minutes late? For all I knew, you’d forgotten about it completely.” She rolled her eyes, as in “How can you possibly be so uptight?”
It was a clash of the time personas: my Time Cop versus her Time Slacker. In this case, the Time Cop was the one who was providing the paychecks, so my persona carried the day. Two little words suggested themselves to me. I paused to roll them around in my mind, savoring their sweetness, and then spoke them to her: “You’re fired.” She was liberated from the bonds of my Time Cop persona, free to go slack on somebody else.
EINSTEIN TIME
When we switch to Einstein Time, we take charge of the amount of time we have. We realize that we’re where time comes from. We embrace this liberating insight: since I’m the producer of time, I can make as much of it as I need! By getting the truth of this statement, we make a major adjustment in ourselves. We heal the dualistic split embedded in the Newtonian relationship with time. We are no longer in an us-versus-them relationship with time. We’re the source of time, and by realizing that fact we become the truth of it.
It takes practice and keen awareness to master this concept. I’ll show you how to make the most of your practice and what to focus your awareness on. If all this sounds mysterious and elusive, just remember: so did driving a car before you could do it. When I first sat in the driver’s seat as a kid, I was sure I could never figure out all those complicated moves. I did, though, and you did, too. If you can do that, you can master Einstein Time. It’s like driving, but with no car.
I’ll be blunt here, just as blunt as when I’m confronting limitations in my own mind: Quit thinking time is “out there.” Take ownership of time—acknowledge that you are where it comes from—and it will stop owning you. Claim time as yours, and it will release its claim on you. The best way I’ve found to do that is to become nimble at asking a specific question. The question allows you to seize the controls of your time and your life.
There’s no trick to the process. You could probably take ownership of time without the question, simply by claiming time as yours to invent as you wish. You could do it by saying something to yourself like “I acknowledge that I’m the source of time.” Look in the mirror and say, “I’m where time comes from.” Or, if you’re one of those folks who like to lecture themselves sternly, say, “There’s no such thing as time ‘out there,’ meathead. It all comes from inside you. You are not time’s victim!” However, the question makes it simple and easy.
To generate an abundance of time, ask yourself,
Where in my life am I not taking full ownership?
Another way to ask it is:
What am I trying to disown?
Or:
What aspect of my life do I need to take full ownership of?
The answer is always blindingly obvious, but we can’t see it until we get humble enough to ask the question. Here’s the principle behind the question: stress and conflict are caused by resisting acceptance and ownership. If there is any part of ourselves or our lives that we’re not fully willing to accept, we will experience stress and friction in that area. The stress will disappear the moment we accept that part and claim ownership of it. At that moment, the disowned part of us is embraced into the wholeness of ourselves, and from that place of wholeness, miracles are born.
For example, if one of your children has a drug problem, you will experience more and more stress and conflict the longer you deny ownership of the problem. If you refuse to look at the problem, your denial will produce greater stress and conflict. If you look at
the problem but transfer ownership by saying, “This isn’t my problem; this is my child’s problem,” you will experience more stress and conflict. Resolution of the problem will begin the moment you or the child claims ownership. It is important to note that one person usually claims ownership first. In my experience, it is rare for both people to step into responsibility at the same time. If you claim ownership first, full resolution won’t occur until your child also claims ownership. When both of you decide to take ownership, as in “This is my problem and I’m committed to resolving it,” you can work genuine miracles. I’ve seen such miracles hundreds of times.
HOW TO BEGIN
Begin with time itself. Do whatever it takes to get yourself in harmony with the reality that you’re the source of time. Once you’re convinced, start acting as if it’s true. A simple way to begin is to put yourself on a radical diet: complete abstinence from complaining about time. This courageous move will take you out of the victim position in regard to time. When you stop complaining about time, you cease perpetuating the destructive myth that time is the persecutor and you are its victim. I found this surprisingly hard when I first started the diet. Until I went on the diet, I hadn’t realized how many of my conversations contained complaints about time. Notice the conversations around you this week. See how many times you hear things like:
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