How to transcend time and leave the chaos of the world behind you
Once I flew from Fiji to California crossing the international time border.
I left at 20:00 on November 2nd and arrived at Midday the same day.
It was a peculiar feeling that stayed with me and reminded me of one of the many limericks I committed to memory when I was younger:
There was a young lady named Bright,
whose speed was much faster than light;
she started one day in a relative way,
And returned on the previous night
Unlike Bright, I hadn’t actually travelled back in time.
Biologically I was still a day older — perhaps more after the jet lag.
But as far as border control was concerned, I had transcended space and time to do what should have been physically impossible.
To me it was a novelty, one of those “huh, that’s weird…” moments.
As time rolls on with unrelenting persisence however, I’d had to dig deeper to find more ingenious ways to steal back my time.
The obligation that we all have to work, in order to make a living, has become a sort of scapegoat that we resent for a perceived lack of time in our lives.
Right now social media is awash with reformed employees turned business gurus shouting incessantly that exchanging our time for money is a fools game.
Like a broken record we hear that financial freedom will always be out of reach if we continue to work for “the man” and a monthly salary.
That idea that time is a commodity that can be bought back with the US dollar, an ailing British pound or an erratic but promising Bitcoin has become sacrosanct for freelancers and business owners.
As more people are converted to the new religion, time accrues in value to society as a whole and its perceived scarcity elevates it to the status of the holy grail, or meaning of life.
Time became more than just a luxury — it became synonymous with eternal youth as silicon valley bio-hackers eek out additional years of longevity with increasingly joyless regimes and diets.
But time is not a limited resource that can be traded on the market, nor is it a meal plan or skin-care routine.
Time is expansive and abundant if….(and this is the caveat)… you don’t just piss it away.
What do I mean?
There are only 24 hours in a day and I’m not a productivity guru.
In fact I hate productivity.
Productivity steals time because its purpose is to automate consciousness to streamline menial tasks so that you can do even more menial tasks with even less consciousness.
Expanding time has nothing to do with owning your own business, productivity hacks or moving westwards along longitudinal lines.
It has much more to do with crow-barring open the doors of your perception, confronting abstract ideas like intentional living and simplifying your existence outside of work.
In this way concepts like ‘work’ don’t pollute your mind and cloud your judgement about time spent v.s time ‘wasted’.
Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Ditch the tranquilisers for tranquility
One of the most satisfying rewards in life are the unexpected benefits of something that already serves you in some way.
Quitting social media and alcohol may come with the caveat of feeling better about yourself and healthier in general but what about the less commonly reported side affects?
Participants report the strange feeling like maybe there are actually somehow more than 24 hours a day…
Abstention from the depressants un-numbs your awareness and brings you back in tune with the natural rhythms of the planet.
Recently sober converts are initially perturbed by and then ecstatic with gratitude for the countless hours of reclaimed time that unfolds before them.
Quitting addictive vices doesn’t just claw you back the hours you spend consuming and ingesting them- it multiplies them, because all of a sudden you don’t feel so lethargic and apathetic any more.
Without distractions and temptations productivity occurs naturally.
There are no covert contracts or bargaining with devil — you have only time and the things that you really want to do.
Reality is really is the strangest trip of them all…
You can afford anything but not everything
Bucket lists are a disaster for personal ambition.
They separate us from our unique desires and make life a tick-box exercise that can never be won….
Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.
― Brian Andreas
We live in the most dynamically over-stimulating time there has ever been.
Almost all of us have lived out fantasies that our ancestors couldn’t even comprehend; intercontinental flights, long distance video calls, cinematic impossibilities, the tastes of 1000 cultures, paid vacation!!
Not every dream can become a reality for every individual — it’s physically, financially and temporally impossible.
Yet we’ve been told that we can have it all and it’s making us sick.
When you streamline your desires and get clarity on what you really want the noise around you fades and your focus narrows in the right direction.
Leave the ‘must-haves’ that society pushes on you by the wayside you free yourself up to go all in on the adventure of a lifetime.
It’s no ones life but your own.
Meditate
The incessant chatter of your mind that plays like a broken record is entirely optional you know?
I find it amusing that those who claim to be too busy for meditation in their lives are precisely those who need it most.
It’s all too easy to nod along and roll eyes later.
Meditation is routinely misunderstood.
It’s not about clearing the duplicate files in the desktop of your mind to a zen-like screensaver of rolling hills and blue sky.
It’s about observing everything, everywhere all at once with in a calm, detached-ness and letting each nuissance and mental trick shrivel under the gaze of your objective magnifying glass….
I worked as a security guard in a gallery once.
I stood all day, back against the wall, watching people watching paintings.
The first few weeks were exciting but every environment becomes staid eventually.
I started talking negatively to myself about how underwhelming it all was.
I fidgeted and sighed and kept checking the time.
The more often i checked, the slower time passed.
It infuriated me and that made time pass even more slowly.
One day I was so bored I started asking one of my colleagues, an older man from China about his life.
He told me that he had come to the UK in the 1970s as political refugee after imprisonment under Mao Zedong.
He told me that for six months he was in solitary confinement in a bare cell for protesting the regime.
Learning to still the whirling thoughts in his head he survived mentally by focusing on plain patches of concrete and observing them thoroughly, with total impartiality before moving onto the next patch and working his way around the room.
I looked around the gallery again and saw an infinite number of stimuli on which I could focus my attention.
I decided not to complain about my boredom and went back to my post.
Time is what we make of it — if you wish away the boring days, you won’t even see the good times whilst they’re happening in front of you.
Invest in sleep like you would in the stock market
For years my dreams were vague and forgettable; blurry one-shot stills from many nights of unrest and groggy alarm-clock stirrings.
Then I quit coffee and alcohol.
The metaphor of Dorothy pushing open the doors to Oz and shifting her world from black and white to trippy, technicolour doesn’t even do justice to the sheer contrast of sleeping without the impediment of stimulants.
We know alcohol affects our sleep. It may help drop off momentarily into sleep but you’re far more likely to wake up in the night.
It also prevents us hitting deep sleep cycles.
If we don’t regularly it deep sleep cycles we are less likely to experience REM sleep too.
Less REM — less dreams — the night passes in a flash and you’re back to the rise and grind like Bill Murray in groundhog day.
Caffeine binds to our adenosine receptor preventing the natural buildup of adenosine throughout the day that tells us when we’re sleepy.
It’s like sticking a wrench in the factory cog of our circadian rhythm and watching as sparks fly and the machine combusts.
It gets worse…
Caffeine causes blood vessels in the brain to constrict.
It’s what gives you that fuzzy, frenetic out-of-touch-with-your-body enthusiasm to do something energetic in the moment.
The increased neuron activity triggers the pituitary gland and *bang* you’re in fight or flight mode.
Late night coffee consumption in particular increases the chance that the dreams you do have will be nightmares that end abruptly and rob you of a good nights sleep.
We spend on average 1/3 of our lives asleep.
You want more time? It’s right in front of you.
See the world in a grain of sand
Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.― Mario Benedetti
In 1911 when studying at Eton boys school in England Aldous Huxley contracted a disease called Keratitis that left him partially blind for the rest of his life.
His experience led him to various left of field practitioners and latterly to the drug mescaline to access realms of consciousness that he felt were escaping him.
Like William Blake, Huxley was fascinated by higher states of cognition and perception that could be accessed by humans with more heightened self-awareness including the dilation of time itself.
Like Huxley I also contracted keratitis that blinded me in one eye a few years back (fortunately only for six weeks — medical progress has advanced considerably in the last century.)
It was at this time, whilst unfamiliar with Huxleys The Doors of Perception that I began experimenting (no, not with mescaline sadly…) with my own states of consciousness.
Even reading the page of a book in a dimly lit room caused distress to my functioning eye as the blinded eye strained unconsciously to compute what it was supposed to be looking at.
I spent a good portion of those six weeks with my eyes closed throughout the day reminiscing and retelling the stories and memories of life and was amazed to find out just how long it had been.
It is true what they say; when one sense diminishes the others increase.
When you stop, I mean really stop, whatever it is that you’re so seemingly busy with and go deep inside yourself it becomes clear that the stories of our lives move at whatever pace we decide they should.
The busyness of the modern world is a trap.
The hustle that apparently buys you back your time through financial independence or early retirement is really just a trade off for the infinite moment that you have in the here and now and in every moment thereafter for the rest of your life.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake: Auguries of Innocence
Freddie Kift — I write about flow states, skill acquisition, travel, languages, and navigating the lived experience
