Our contribution to the parade never failed to raise eyebrows and generally won the "Most Creative and Unusual" ribbon each year. Once, my friend Asha marched inside a refrigerator box that we had transformed into a giant Grandfather Clock. I walked alongside her, and would approach the people lining the streets and ask, "Do you need any extra time?" and then hand them their prize: 8" circles of construction paper, numbered like clocks, and labeled as "Free Time," "Extra Time," "Spare Time," "Lots of Time," and so forth. When I ran out of circles, I began telling spectators, "Sorry, I'm out of time," or "I've got no more time."  

I believe we were making some sort of profound statement about the nature of Time, but we left it to the bystanders to figure out exactly what the message was. But I can elaborate on it here, some twenty years later, now that all that parade hubbub has died down. Father William McNamara, a Carmelite monk, used to talk about "Holy Leisure," the great art of accomplishing nothing, and it's concomitant, appreciating everything. For when you are so consumed with getting somewhere, the destination becomes more important than the journey, and, as John Lennon reminded us, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." If we miss the journey, surely we've missed the whole trip. And yet the idea of "wasting time" feels like...like, well...it feels like such a waste of time! But if time is precious, what manner of "spending" it most fulfills its promise and purpose?

The Jews figured this one out in their approach to Sabbath, when for 24 hours one does nothing in terms of manipulating reality, producing anything or "becoming," and instead takes a deep breath into pure "being," relaxing into what has been called a "Palace in Time" that is actually outside of linear time. Committed meditators are essentially attempting to enter that Palace on a daily instead of weekly basis, for to spend a few moments free of time is to simultaneously recognize that that itself, paradoxically, is time's greatest use; yet measured by weekday standards, it accomplishes absolutely nothing! (The Zen people have been trying to sell us on Nothing for aeons.) For as the days continue to relentlessly race by, Sabbath provides a weekly respite, a glimpse of the Eternal, imagining that we are looking out over our lives and seeing that the work of our hands is done, and that "it is good." What a relief, yet immediately afterward we wind up the clocks, reset the timers, and come charging out of the gates, once again working way too hard, sometimes with great desperation, to get somewhere that we imagine is far more important than here, and we want to get there as quickly as possible!

The late great Jiddu Krishnamurti pointed out that time is actually the result of thought, or in a way, is thought: in those blessed moments when we drop the mind and enter the "flow" of our experience, or the "zone," all thought disappears and we wake up to the glory of the present moment, unblemished by memory or anticipation. It is only thought, when it enters back into consciousness, that automatically brings time along with it, and re-imposes the linear storyline in which we find ourselves, with all our pleasant recollections and/or laments about the past, as well as our excitement and/or anxiety about the future, all of which had, for a short while, been mercifully absent.

Then, to really confuse me, the Tibetan teacher Tsoknyi Rinpoche has advised that, just as we should not be preoccupied with the past or future, we should likewise avoid dwelling too much on the present! A statement like that is liable to send die-hard The Power of Now readers reeling off their meditation cushions, stupefied. His point, I believe, was that the "present" is still a time-based referent. It is a point in the continuum from past to future where we happen to be in any given moment, but it still keeps us on that continuum.

The only way out is through making a sideways, trans-dimensional leap into the Eternal, and that is easier said than done, unless it arrives, as is most often the case, through sheer Grace, one of those rare gifts of awakening when we recognize that our fundamental, true nature is already, eternally free of time's tragic trajectory from birth, through aging to death. We see that we live as if we were actors in a "period piece." Past, present and future are when our story takes place, and we are but "a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage /And then is heard no more." Thankfully, our primordial, essential identity is revealed as prior to all that, impassive witness of it, and therefore ever-relaxed in the Eternal emptiness of a fundamental Being-Awareness that lives forever outside and prior to the tyranny of time. (But who has time to mull over things of this nature?)

For those of us striving to accomplish nothing, Facebook is a great time-waster, but it has redeemed itself lately by putting me in touch with a few people from my very distant past that I had assumed were gone forever. In one instance, I shared a deeply moving exchange with an old friend from my childhood, a woman with whom I'd had no contact for 45 years or more. She happened to be the target of a merciless vendetta I embarked on during our playground years, the object of which was to make her feel as terrible as possible. The only motivation for my behavior that I've been able to fathom in looking back, is that I probably found her beautiful and had a mad crush on her. What better way to express infatuation than through cruelty and torture? (Some of my girlfriends over the ensuing years might argue that it was a technique I continued to employ at times.)