Positively Glorious!

Every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to be reminded about the beautiful variety in life. The differences of opinion that set you off-center, shake you out of routine, and cause you to pause to look around and see. I had one of those moments yesterday, while reading a blog post of a friend.

So, since this is somewhat based on that, you should take a moment, head over to MorganPDX.com and read “I jaywalk because I’m Jewish.” Go ahead, it’s short, well-written, and will only take five minutes.

I’ll wait.

…

Back? Good. Now the reason I love this post is because it’s a perfect illustration to me of why people will never get along– even while it’s a perfect illustration of why they should. What am I talking about? Subtle, but it showed me that two people can have such similar goals, similar ideals, similar feelings on a subject, and can still arrive at completely opposing outcomes.

Talk about wild!

That’s why the Nazis rose to power

It goes like this, I completely understand and empathize with Morgan’s view. I know that others do too. Morgan mentioned that it might be over the top to equate crossing signals and Nazis, but I was at a Leo Kottke concert where he said “Okay, my guitar’s in tune because the machine said so. That’s why the Nazis rose to power.”

Basically, she has a point, and has internalized that point. Crossing the street when she feels it’s appropriate, whether or not a mechanized sign tells her to, is a way to stay thoughtful. Stay mindful.

What’s interesting to me is this. Staying mindful is exactly why I wait for the sign.

Time, Time, Time is on my side. Yes it is.

It’s about mindfulness, and my stand for mindfulness comes from an anthropological perspective on time. I’ve written and researched quite a bit on time elsewhere, but the basic idea comes down to this. The more accurately a culture can measure time, the more the society becomes dictated by that measurement of time.

My interest in this came when I realized that two parts of my ancestor were ridiculed by the third part because of time. “Colored people’s time” and “Indian time” were chastisements that our great British fore-bearers used quite a bit. I used to think colored-people’s time and Indian time were different, but one day I realized that they were the same thing. More than this, they were the same as “Irish time,” “Island Time” and a host of other “times” that–basically– Northern European colonists were pissed off about.

Modern society– specifically our relationship with time– spawns from British culture, but that’s not “human” or “universal.” In Britain, things were run by the clock. It was the clock that dictated when things happened, what was done. Things, in Britain, ran “on time.”

Take the briefest of moments, and think about how much this has permeated your own life. It is perfectly acceptable to say “I can’t eat now, it’s too early.”

Think about this one: “It’s late, so I have to go to bed.”

Now let’s back up a few hundred years and realize something. People used to go to bed when they were tired. They used to eat when they were hungry. Taken from a specific perspective, it’s absolutely ridiculous to say “I’m not allowed to eat because a clock is telling me I can’t.”

Stop looking at the clock and listen to your fucking body, people.

Moving Fast

There’s another aspect to this that’s even more subtle. Time sensitivity. The more accurately we can measure time, the more we focus on smaller bits of time. We think seconds count. And so we do everything we can to “save” them. We actually think we can “save” time.

You may not believe this, but there are a great many cultures who laugh at us for our ridiculously naïve notion that we can “save,” and “spend” time. For our notion that time is a commodity– that time is money. It’s really quite silly.

Because think of it. While we’re busy obsessing over “saving” those few seconds, are we actually living them? Are we somehow storing them up and using them later in the day? To what? Watch TV? Program a fucking computer?

Of course we are. That’s why we’ve had 50+ years of “time saving” devices and yet have less time today than 50 years ago. It’s justification of effort. If we don’t buy into this whole “saving time” rubbish, then we feel pretty fucking stupid, and we don’t want to feel stupid, so we buy in.

And we do everything fast.

We drive fast, we walk fast, we work fast, we eat fast. We drive to work while we’re eating, hell, we work while we’re driving while we’re eating!

We multi-task. Why?

To save time.

And everything we do get’s faster, and we keep saving more and more time, and we keep moving faster, and then it’s 30 years later and you don’t know why you never bothered to learn how to fucking swim.

Stop!

Here’s the deal, people: There are two dominant signals that Modern Western culture gives us. 1) Be different, and 2) Hurry the fuck up.

No. Put away the judgment and think about that for a minute. Our entire culture is based on “Standing out,” and “Moving fast.” The the more differnt you are, the better. The faster, the better.

Give me a four letter word that is universally symbolic of “stupid” in America…

Slow.

Oop, there it is.

Oh shit, I’m sorry, didn’t you want to talk about mindless adherence to the machine?

One time I found that I was walking fast through downtown Portland, crossing against the light, hurrying to get to someplace. It didn’t even occur to me until I got there that I didn’t need to be there for 15 minutes. I basically hurried all the way across downtown when I didn’t need to. Why? Because that’s just how you move downtown. You walk fast. You hurry. I was just being part of the machine.

Because walking extra slowly felt…

Stupid.

I think about this a lot. Mainly because my dad thought about it a lot, and he made me think about it. Growing up, I never understood why the man walked so fucking slow!

Swimming in Time

The Modern Western perspective on time is just that. The Modern Western perspective. It’s not the only valid perspective. For some cultures, time is not a linear flow of a clock. Believe it or not, there are cultures that see time not as a train, but as a pool in which they swim.

And your perspective can change. Your experience of time can change. You can change time. You can slow it down.

Just wait.

And that’s what I do. I like to wait. Because waiting is– not a pausing of time– but a space that gives me the ability to truly experience it.

Think about it. Waiting is something that we are supposed to universally hate. But what is waiting?

Well, if the clock is driving you, then waiting is “wasted” time. Another monetary term to describe our temporal experience, and another term that is comical to many non-Western cultures. Really, do you honestly believe that you can “waste” time? Time is. It’s not saved, stored, spent or wasted. It just is. It is our perception that’s wasted.

You live every moment of every day regardless of what time does. When you are waiting, that is not time “wasted” that’s time “lived.” It’s your decision to ignore your experience of it and be frustrated about waiting rather than happy about living.

It’s your choice.

You’re life is not on pause, you are just swimming in a different part of the pool.

But we’re so used to things moving fast, we need super-stimulated sensory overflow. We’re in the machine. Cogs. Moving fast to save of time and promote the efficient transfer of information– of money.

We’re used to fast. We expect fast. We even want fast. So much so that we’d never think of just sitting in a chair and staring at the sky for 6 hours. Or 2 hours. Or a half hour.

Or 30 seconds.

Oop, there it is.

We don’t even think about it. We just do everything fast. We say stupid people are “slow,” we stand out in a crowd, we celebrate individualism, and we save time by not waiting for a 30-fucking-second stop light.

Perspectives

When I came west from the East Coast, I was amazed at the number of people that waited at crosswalks. In the Northeast, you might actually get hit for doing that. Seriously. Here, everything seemed just a bit, well, slower. So I decided that I liked that. After all, it gives me a small space with nothing to do. Nothing to do but “be.”

So I decided to swim in time by waiting for the light, looking at the buildings around me, staring at the sky. It’s only 30 seconds. But it’s a nice 30 seconds. I had to condition myself, of course. And sometimes I fall back into the machine and just hurry along to nowhere. But mostly, I wait.

I don’t jaywalk, because I’m an Indian. And I’m trying not to let this world, this culture, dictate my experience of time. I’m trying not to let a fucking clock tell me when I’m allowed to eat and sleep. I’m trying to remember that my experience is not a linear fast moving train, but a blade of grass in the wind.

I’m trying to be mindful. I’m trying to remind myself that slow is not stupid– despite the fact that everything I see tries to convince me of that fact.

This is why what Morgan wrote is so remarkable for me. Because we feel the same way. We feel the same way, yet we have arrived at two mutually exclusive outcomes. She doesn’t want to listen to a machine, so she jaywalks. I don’t want to listen to a machine, so I wait.

This is why humans will never get along, and this is why we should. Because half the time we want the same thing, just in a different way– and humans get so caught up in the “different outcome” side, they forget to look at the “same desires” part.

Because it’s not about the outcome, it’s about mindfulness. I think it’s beautiful that Morgan jaywalks. I want Morgan to jaywalk. Why? Not because I care one fucking way or another about her jaywalking, but because she’s found a way to stay mindful. She’s found her cue that helps her make a choice. She’s a conscious soul making a conscious decision.

She’s not mindlessly saying “must move fast…” She saying “This moment in my life is a mindful choice, and I am honoring my ancestors by making this choice.”

It doesn’t matter what the choice is. What matters– the only thing that matters to any of us is this:

It is a choice.