Are you racing against time?
Have you ever felt like you don’t have enough time? Or that you just want to get something over with?
I noticed there’s a “race against time.”
There's also a “hunt to find the right thing.”
When you're in this paradigm of racing against time and hunting for the right thing, both of which are falsehoods, you get this never-ending experience of looking for the right thing and never actually finding it, and always feeling like time is working against you in your pursuit of it, in the sense of, “Shoot, I'm not gonna have time to find it. I'm gonna run out of time. Oh, if I do this thing here, I won't have time to hunt down the thing.”
There's also an experience of time that is not right here. Or, there can be an experience of time that is not right here. For example, I'm lying on my couch recording this voice memo right now. Before I lied down to record it, I had this thought and realization that I had washed my bedsheets in the laundry machine today, and they're sitting in my room waiting to be put over my bed, and my bed is waiting to be made before I go to sleep.
In that thought, I went from “sitting on my couch” to “in my bed,” and then because that activity — making my bed — couldn't possibly be the “right thing,” it felt like I was losing time. All imagined in my head in this experience of time that wasn't, in some sense, right here, right now, because it wasn't where I was right here, right now.
In the imagination, I wanted to “just get it over with.” And then I felt in my body a slight contraction because I was experiencing time, and I was experiencing the lack of the pursuit of the right thing. I was losing time and I wasn't finding the right thing. Hence, contraction. But are either of those things true? Is time even true? Is this race against time true? And is the right thing, and the hunting of the right thing, even true and possible and real? What time is there other than right now, ever?
Maybe me making my bed exists. But at the same time, does it? Because it's not what's here. Then the experiencing or the imagining of me making my bed in that “future” actually creates time because it creates something that's not here and right now. And thus that's either the past or it's the future, which brings me out of the “present.”
But yet, that imagined future and that remembered past is experienced in the right here, right now. So the imagined reality of time isn't actually time. It's still right here and right now, which is all it's ever been. There is no race against time because time doesn't actually exist.
Because it's always right here and right now, there's no actual lapsing of time. There's no, “okay, it's right here, right now, and then now it's right here, right now. And now it's right here, right now. And now it's right here, right now.” What has elapsed? Experience has happened. But is that time, or is that an individual, indivisible moment of infinity and an individual expression of infinity (which is always happening all of the time)?. Constant expressions of infinity that you're experiencing, which are always right here, right now. So there's an infinite expression of right here, right now. And because that expression is so vast and so constant, we attempt to structure it into time to make it a bit more comprehensible. We create technologies that create “ticks” and “tocks” in the present moment that, continuously happening in the present moment, eventually add up to a certain number that we call seconds, or minutes, or hours, and so forth. That can be helpful to make sure we don’t overcook the boiling pasta, but it’s still a collection of nows.
And the other part, hunting down the right thing, is never a successful hunt because there is no right thing, just as there's no answer to life. Nobody has ever figured out life. There is no right thing. And so any hunt of it — the idea of the right thing doesn't exist right here, right now (which again creates time) — it creates a desire to not be right here, right now, and to instead be at the “right thing.” Hence why me imagining myself making the bed, which can't possibly be the right thing, creates tension in my body.
The only possible “right thing” can be right here, right now, in the full vastness of infinity. Because that already exists, you've already found it. So the hunt is completely pointless, and you can let it go and experience infinity, which is all you could ever want to experience, now.
So then when you're experiencing now, you have the freedom and the opportunity to say, “well, what do I want to experience now? What do I choose to do?” It's not, “what should I be doing?” Because there's no other should than right now, because there's literally no other possible thing than right now. And it's never not that way. Meaning it always is that way, so it literally cannot be anything else, which is why “should” is a disconnected word in reality and experience.
“What do I, as infinity, want to express?” And then you connect it to the formula: act on your highest excitement, to the best of your ability, with zero insistence on the outcome.
And if that includes making the bed because having a made bed with fresh sheets that I can comfortably sleep in at night is an exciting experience, I make the bed. Not so I can hurry back toward my life. It’s as an exciting, full, wholly given — to the best of my ability — expression of my excitement and my freedom and the experience of what it is to make the bed in that moment, which is an incredible experience and an indivisible experience of infinity, one that is unrepeatable. One of one within infinity. And I get to make the bed however I want and putting whatever energy into it that I want, and that creates the one of one experience I have with infinity.
These “chores” often come up in life with making the bed, doing the dishes, vacuuming, taking the dog out. Even the word we use, “chore,” and what it implies is hilarious. It's like it's some tax we pay before we return to life. No, no, it is life. It is the fullness of life. It is the current expression of infinity and its unbounded beauty and uniqueness. That's incredible. It turns the mundane into the divine, into something sacred. What's ordinary becomes extraordinary, constantly, because it's always extraordinary, because nothing is ordinary, because everything is a new, unique, indivisible expression of infinity in this moment, now. Warm water running over your hands, the sound of plates touching, your dog pulling you outside into the night air, the feeling of clean sheets stretching over the mattress, the hum of the vacuum moving across the floor.
We think of all these things to do as if they're taking us away from life, as if they're draining us of time, or pulling us away from the pursuit of the “thing,” when they are the thing, when they are all of time, when they are all of life. That's a beautiful connection to make, and a beautiful experience to have.
There's this hilariousness of life where it's like we're in the allness of life, let's say doing the dishes, but we're thinking, I need to finish this so I can get on with my life, so I can get back to my life. There is no on with your life. There is no back to your life. This is life. This is now. After the dishes is just going to be another now. It's now to now. It's just now.
Nothing is taking time away from your life because whatever you are experiencing is everything your life could ever be. That doesn't mean every experience is equally pleasurable, or that you might like one thing over another. You can like writing more than cleaning toilets. But while you're actually cleaning the toilet, there's no advantage in psychologically abandoning yourself while doing it. And that's where the extraordinary enters. And it's not because you're like, “wow, cleaning the toilet is amazing!!!!” You simply stop requiring the moment to be something grander than itself. And paradoxically, that's what reveals its grandness.
It's a completely ordinary Tuesday evening, right? You're barefoot. Your dog needs to go outside. You walk out. It’s humid. A car drives past. Some insect is making a sound. Nothing “important” happens. And yet, realize that exact experience has never happened before and will never happen again. Because it can't. There's no time. It's one of one within infinity. That's what's constantly happening.
We often create this hierarchy of experience where, ooh, launching a new business, that's really it. That's really important. But cleaning this pan after cooking dinner, nah, that's not really it. Folding clothes, nah. But yet reality itself isn't actually saying that. It's just life and life and life. Existence is expressing itself absolutely fully and just as completely through your folding of a shirt as it is you making a million dollars. Infinity doesn't become more infinite in one moment versus the next.
Maybe the craziest part is that “ordinary life” is the transcendent state that everyone is looking for.
We already have all the time we could ever want, and we already have the thing we’re hunting for.