SUNRISE - January 16, 2011

“No use thinking of the past for its gone, don't think of the future because it has to come, think of the present because that’s where you are and that’s the place from where you can control the past and the future. “  -  Kazi Shams

January 16, 2011 Sunrise 7:22 am

I posted yesterday about the simulation of ‘creating time’ by borrowing from another TIME jar, labeled for a different use of your minutes.  I had been reading a book in the evenings as I awaited the sandman.  A good read:  “Die Trying by Lee Child”.   

As it is with any good action-oriented novel, the pace quickened as it neared the denouement of the adventure.  Far too soon, it was TIME to close it up and get to sleep, as I had another Sunrise pending in a few hours.  I made the conscious decision the finish the book last night (this morning) and finally closed the last chapter at about 3:40 am.  I took (stole) minutes from my allotted-sleep jar to add minutes to my read-the-book jar. 

Alarm still went off at the same time and I got up to greet the new sunrise, review my gratitudes and plan my day. Three hours rest. Then I made a decision to transfer minutes from my greet-sunrise-review-gratitudes-plan-day-eat breakfast-download photos-write the blog jar so I could go back to bed to grab a couple of hours of sleep. 

There is no end to this behavior; little time-ripples rushing across the pond.  Every time I‘borrow time’ forward, My static, original allotment is diminished.  All of today’s planned hour-long  projects now became forty-five  minute projects to recover the loss of TIME. 

No regret; probably do it again if ‘do-overs’ was a real option and not just a childhood game.

The impact: 

*Read the book because I wanted to – whew!

*I am becoming more efficient with my hour (completing the first three projects in close to forty-five minutes each.

* By 3pm I should be caught back up.

*If I am successful, I can now justify staying up to 3:45 am –ha

*Note to self- you are not 21 anymore – Take a precious minute of your day and think twice before you do that again anytime soon.

rlw

SUNRISE - January 15, 2011

"You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough."  - Joe E. Lewis

January 15, 20121 - Sunrise 7:22 am

Ah, a three day weekend.  MLK Day or Martin Luther King memorial holiday. We have been granted an extra day on Monday to add to the weekend.  Does that in itself imply we gained TIME?  Does that mean we have, somehow,‘more’ TIME?  Not really of course, we have just dipped into the “have-to go-to-work-this-week jar” and plucked out one-fifth of the contents and plopped it into the “whoopee…my-time-is-my-own” jar. Same amount of time - different jars.

Just as the statement: “The TRUTH is what we perceive it to be”, is a universal known factor in how we guide ourselves through the wilderness, we mentally accept the fact that borrowed time is somehow newly created time.  Unfortunately, not true.   Each of us can, however, change our view of time with a subtle little twist of our mental kaleidoscope. Adding mousse to our hair doesn't create hair, if merely gives chemical volume and the appearance of more hair. A magic trick.  This is true of 'gained' and 'lost' minutes daily; added and plucked from one project to another.

When a person is diagnosed with Cancer, they are given the odds on how long the current statistics indicate they are likely to survive.  One, two –three years perhaps only a month.  One year is an eternity if trapped in a cave with bees, but just a flashing nanosecond when there is much living, yet to do.   

In cooking you would describe the challenge of looking at your flavoring ingredients; individually destined for a certain taste, but deciding to apply personal, intentional efforts to 'create' something unique and different with what you have been given, by making a beautiful reduction sauce…applying intense heat – (boiling) to your sauce in an open skillet to cause the flavors to become stronger and intensify by boiling away the unnecessary water and liquids.  This application creates a totally different result than if the very same ingredients were not intentionally altered, thereby producing an improved result.  

 Often, when a Cancer patient is very, very, very lucky, they beat the odds and live beyond the diagnosed number of days the doctor allotted to them.  Wouldn't one use the same concept with their ingredients in life as they would in their kitchen?  Would they intensify or dilute the flavoring?   

They now have a finite amount of time in their life to use as they wish, from catching up on all the past episodes of ‘General Hospital’ to skydiving naked over the Napa Valley.   

For personal enlightenment, they probably should not do so much of the former, but a lot that is pretty darn close to the latter.

rlw

“Just as you began to feel that you could make good use of time, there was no time left to you.”   George Eliot

SUNRISE - January 14, 2011

“Each moment is a doorway to time travel. Being in this very moment and no other, time as we know it stops. You can Freeze-Frame and stop. Then you can make another choice. You can stay in the same holographic pattern or you can choose a different one”. -Sara Paddison.

January 14, 2011 Sunrise 7:23 am

I am thoroughly enjoying this current daily observation exercise.  An unfortunate modern justification for 'stealing' is called “re-purposing”.  It is not that I wish or can steal time.  I have all that I need – if I do it right.  The re-purposing is how I choose to use it.  This blog could have been posted yesterday, however I used the time to attend my daughter’s school concert….and promptly fell asleep upon returning home.  

I had stayed up until about 2:30 am finishing a book I have owned for awhile, but never found” TIME” to read it.  So, I did.  Not all, but got deeper into it.   I re-purposed my sleeping time, obviously, just temporarily, to get the pages turning.   

Nest on the horizon:  Signing up for book writing and cooking classes at the local “experts teach you” Learning Exchange.  Perhaps, someday, I will sit down to a new recipe bowl of chili and read my most recently published tome.

“Time is like money, the less we have of it to spare the further we make it go”. Josh Billings

rlw 

SUNRISE January 13, 2011

January 13, 2011 Sunrise 7:23 am

“Lost”!!!

“Yesterday”.

“Somewhere between Sunrise and Sunset, 

Two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes”.

No reward is offered, for they are gone forever”. - Horace Mann

When I traveled in Europe many years ago, I had a self-imposed budget to keep me in bed and board for the six months I was traveling.  It was patterned after Frommer’s – “Europe on $10 a Day”.  I had a certain amount of money in my pocket.  I had a finite number of days I wished to spend traveling on an extended grand adventure.  Pretty easy math.  Number of dollars divided by number of days for the maximum experience.  There were no more dollars coming into the equation, so for the equation to work, I had to be careful with the amount spent per day. 

I carried a little blue spiral notebook with me and it was very much like a checkbook.  I would track my expenses minutely, every penny, every day.  If I spent less money on Tuesday, I could carry that over to the following Wednesday or add it back into the total.  I had three columns.  The first was the total dollars available for the day ($10.00). The second was what I actually spent that day.  The third was my plus or minus to carry over to the next day.  Pretty simple accounting.  If I knew there was a day coming up that would require more money, I would miserly live a simpler life in the proceeding days to save up for the big spending day/week. 

If an unplanned spending opportunity caught me off guard and I went over my daily budget, I had to pay the piper in the following days, until I was even again.  I couldn’t run out of money before my prepaid-can’t-change-the-date return flight back to the U.S. arrived.

Although I now realize that TIME, in the form of our precious hours, has greater value than money, the equation stays the same, but with an unknown number of days to complete the equation.  This begs the cocktail-hour game question, “If you had but a week (day, month, year, a thousand days) to live, how would you spend it”?

Let’s say, you are in Europe – you have thirty days and $300 dollars (obviously, I am still trapped in 1976 when that was actually sufficient).  How do you choose?  You can’t travel everywhere with that amount of money and that number of days.  How do you maximize your adventure with what you have?  Do you spend a little each day and travel more or do you travel less but spend more where you are? You have to have dollars right up to the last day. You have to make decisions, hopefully mostly good, based on leaving Europe, with the least amount of regret and the biggest payoff for your days invested.

Let’s say, rather, you are a living soul on Earth (what a concept) – you have 24 hours in each day and you have 1000 days to spend them.  How do you maximize your adventure with what you have available?  You have to make decisions, hopefully mostly good, based on leaving Life, with the least amount of regret, and with the biggest payoff for your days invested.

When I was in Europe, I had a decision to make after arriving in Greece.  An unexpected circumstance depleted my traveling account significantly.  My return ticket home was four months away.  No more money coming in – no fewer or greater days available.  I had one hundred twenty days left and based on my original budget, I had just enough money for ninety days.   

 The solution I chose was to go off-grid for thirty days on a remote beach on one of the Greek islands and lived on $1.00 a day (remember, this is 1976).  I lived in a little bamboo hut on a stretch of beach facing the Aegean Sea.  Although it wasn’t the grand adventure to Spain, as I had planned, the time spent there was one of the highlights of my trip.   

Totally alone. No cultural or historically civilizing distractions.  The stony beach stretched away for as far as I could see to the left and right.  The beautiful blue-green ocean glistening into the horizon in front of me, thirty feet from the front of my hut.  Behind me, a massive olive orchard, with civilization somewhere beyond.   

An Island in Greece many years ago

Time to think and reflect, with no pull on me to mow the lawn, set the clock, get to bed on time, rush off to work, or any of the usual daily obligations vying for my minutes.  In the beginning I thought the thirty days would never end and was brooding over my loss of a preplanned foreign adventure to Spain.  As I became more comfortable internally with me, my newly discovered friend, I soon lamented the rapidly disappearing hours and days.

The road to introspection, unfortunately, is too often  the road least traveled, but more often than not, it will surely make all the difference (accolades to Robert Frost). As I am most fortunate to have had many magnificent real-world travel adventures in my life-time, full-enough to cause my memory box to overflow, the last grand use of remaining TIME, spelunking into the mysterious abyss of self-analysis, bodes to be the most rewarding and fulfilling adventure yet.

“I live in my heart.  So it doesn’t matter where my body lives.  If I am happy inside, then I live in Paradise, no matter where my residence is.  If you can’t find happiness inside yourself, you’ll never find it in the outside world, no matter where you move.  Wherever you go, there you are.  You take yourself with you. - Mac Anderson, Simple Truths

rlw

SUNRISE - January 12, 2011

“We wait. We are bored. No, don't protest, we are bored to death, there's no denying it. Good. A diversion comes along and what do we do? We let it go to waste... In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness.” – Samuel Becket, Waiting for Godot.

January 12, 2011 Sunrise 7:23 am

So, does this imply (or even shout) about the beauty, pureness and value of diversion?  Does doing nothing with your moments place you in the midst of nothingness?  Does embracing the vast multitude of adventures (external and internal) place one squarely in the deliciously perilous path of diversion?  Dangers abound with every adventure, every bold stride, up, down, and around the cliff-side trails we may take in a fully realized life.

It is the invisible signs of danger that we should worry most about.  One can obtain a Radon or Carbon Monoxide detector for your home to protect you from the colorless, odorless gases that can kill.  Because you can’t touch it, taste it, see, it or smell it…does that imply that it doesn’t exist.  No.  Only your next of kin and the coroner can testify to its existence.  For you, it is too late.

Behind that rock, off to the side of the stream of living, is a nice safe spot with no obvious danger signals, as to the inevitable erosion of our given TIME.  As there are no obvious signs of peril with deadly gases in our home, does that mean that there are no apparent hazards of a dormant, unfulfilled life? 

Where is the life-unrealized-detector we can plug into to be warned of dangerously toxic levels building up by not living life to its fullest potential?  Can one pick up a handy, life-altering-warning device on eBay, at the hardware store or even at church?  I have walked by the shelf displaying radon detectors a hundred times and never acquired one.  Am I subconsciously wagering that the $11.95 is more valuable to me than to protect me and my family’s life?  Am I even conscious of the decision (through indecision) I am making?  One is now installed.

Does one have to be on their deathbed, muttering “if only I had…” to grasp the cruel lessons of a life unrealized?  At the end of our days, which memory gives us more warmth in our final hour? 

“I took that irreplaceable week out of my bank of time and just hung out, relaxed, watched TV and just chilled, I can’t quite remember the details.

or

“I took that week out of my irreplaceable bank of time and hiked the treacherous back mountain trail in Peru to the lost city of Machu Picchu and I remember quite vividly the unspeakable beauty and adventuresome romance of seizing the day”. (Thank you Sharon and Peter Chamberlin)

We cannot live every week that way, but we should have a bucket load of them in our personal story.  Perhaps we can enhance our story by spending TIME on behalf of  a worthy cause, pursuing a new skill, gaining knowledge in a hundred new ways, or simply the most personal and perhaps, the most perilous of all adventures: simple, quiet introspection.

There is much to be said about living our days, so we can be proud of the way those around us will remember our life, but more importantly, there is more to be said about spending our precious time in a way, so we will be proud of how we remember ourselves.  

Count your Sunrises.  Every day holds new promise of a life fulfilled.

“To live our unlived life is to become fulfilled, to bring purpose and meaning to our existence”.  Robert A.Johnson  ‘Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose.’

rlw

SUNRISE - January 11, 2011

Today is 1-11-11 on the Gregorian calendar.  Other than its resemblance to some bit of computer programming code, I am at a loss for its significance.  Or, perhaps that is because there is none.
A day!   What is its value to the whole of our existence? 

January 11, 2011 Sunrise 7:23 am

A single day in what we hope is the first of a thousand more.  If one were to remove a single line of computer code in a series of zeros and ones, it would change everything.  Every line and every day has vast importance to the whole, but only when combined with the whole.  A line of code by itself has no apparent meaning and does not reveal its importance as a catalyst to the lines of code that preceded it and those that will follow.
 

"Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!"
- Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

" Waiting for Godot."  A classic discussion regarding the value of time given and of time lost. How often in our lives do we have that epiphany where we have a  momentary glimpse into the secrets of the Universe, that bright, golden nanosecond of understanding, where the clarity of our mission, our point, our reason for being, is revealed? 

How do we possess that fleeting vision and build upon it for our remaining hours?  Every day comes to a close.  The new day dawns; ripe with promise.  What was the magic formula, the guiding principle, the key to understanding,  intended to enhance all of our tomorrows? 

It is said that each of the celestial souls wandering the Universe were created all-knowing. Not unlike the beauty of a fresh picked flower plucked from mother flora, the decomposition of man’s knowledge begins at the moment of birth, Our lives are spent regaining the wisdom we seem to have already known. 

Who are we really?  What is our purpose? When do we engage with life on our true path?  Where does our destiny lie – in this incarnation or the next?  Why do often we lose the path?  And most importantly, How do we regain our own true path and become reunited with the consciousness we had when our day dawned?

"But that is not the question. Why are we here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come”. - Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot