What’s something you’re stuck on?
“Time and thoughts about our relationship with it.”
What is your relationship with time?
“An agnostic’s relationship with God.”
Tell me more.
“I know time exists, and I don’t have a conflict with that existence, but I have a sense true freedom requires its absence, or at least its absence from my considerations, and that makes me think about it more than I might prefer to.”
What is an example?
“It comes up in conversations with coworkers, deadlines and the like, and familiars. I suspect that once a person attains some level of security – no chemical addictions or particularly toxic relationships – his next greatest obstacle is time. Its management, its shortage, its governance of activity, its relationship, finally, to geography.”
I’m seeing a word like tyrannical.
“Maybe. That’s the relationship I sense others have with it.”
What do you want from time?
“A guardrail, I guess. A way to make life reliable and loosely routine. An independent auditor of priorities.”
What else?
“I think of people saying life is too short and I wonder what their comparison was, to have that conclusion. I suspect life is the perfect duration, whether it ends this evening or fifty years from now.”
What about doing and being?
“I think some of this is related to that, too, yes. Doing requires timeliness in a way being doesn’t. I wonder, often, when folks talk about time-management issues, if doing one more thing might possibly help them. This loops back towards self-acceptance. Perhaps that is the one thing they might do to clear their calendars henceforth.”
What is left?
“Anxiety. What else might remain? Does time create anxiety? That isn’t even the most interesting question. In the absence of time, is anxiety possible?”
What about self-acceptance?
“That is a timeless state, for as long as it lasts.”
(Smiling.)