"I did step out of time," said Sindbad with satisfaction. He wondered if he should apologize for the disappearance, but, after all, he had fulfilled a promise. If you remember, he said, a few months ago I said I will embark on a journey in search of lost time.
In order to do that I had to get lost myself. For those of us who have been brought up in the Christian tradition, it is not easy to escape from the rectangular walls they squeezed our souls into. The topic is also linked to work, which is a subject for a separate reflection. It was not easy to allow myself to simply skip several Fridays, but I had to look at the issue from the other side. Of course, the traveller nodded, I had the help of circumstances, a hippy camp hidden deep in a remote valley in a poor country.
So instead of the ever present pinch of European time, I tried a different approach. One area is transport. How do you get to a village in the third world with a lot of luggage?
The Nepalese are not afraid of what seems an impossible task. First, the enormous cauldrons and other things of the rainbow gathering are loaded onto the back seats of the bus. Emptied out because they only fit through the door vertically. The other seats soon fill up with passengers. Then a man on a motorcycle waves the bus down. He’d been guarding a pile of sacks of grain that are dragged into the aisle between the seats. Soon, some matrones arrive, climb on top of the sacks and sit down on them. The remaining space at the front of the bus is beginning to resemble a flower pot, with people leaning into every direction from a small base. Then three young men clamber up the steps and hang on from the outside. The bus, completely overloaded and billowing black smoke, starts up the pass with its engine roaring but stops at each waiting group. Although it’s quite obvious that not even a mouse can fit on board, each time a long discussion ensues in Nepali about what to do next. After a quarter of an hour the bus continues on its journey with the original passengers.
Another local method is to widen the road between the capital and the second largest city by first removing asphalt from long stretches of it. Then repairs begin on the whole stretch at the same time. Given the amount of machinery available, it is clear that the end result is years away. The two-hundred-kilometre bus journey takes eleven hours on the congested road full of traffic jams. All during the bumpy ride the passengers are calm. No one swears, no one shakes a fist. Pokhara is eleven hours from Kathmandu and that's it.
Sindbad, although he liked the calmness of the locals, felt that the technology could still be improved a tiny bit. I’m not sure, he thought, that we had found the ideal solution to time pressure. But what could it be?
In NLP there is a lot of talk about nominalizations, processes that seem to be things, he wondered. When we read “the banking system is threatened with collapse”, our minds take the sentence as if something were standing next to the 'banking system' (a double nominalization) and threatening it with its finger, or pointing a gun at it. Or a mountainside or something is about to slide down on it. As if ‘collapse’ was a real person or thing.
Limiting nominalizations can be dissembled by finding their verbal root. "What exactly is collapsing?" "How does it collapse?" Or here's another sentence: "I can't live up to expectations." A response to that could be: "Exactly who expects of you what?" This way we can leave behind the monsters formed in the mind and arrive to the sensory information from which the person has built the bogeyman.
Time is one of the more difficult nominalizations to deconstruct since there is no verb to which it can be traced back to. Although we pretend it’s as real as a bowl of cherries, no one knows what time actually is. "I can't visit grandma more often because of time constraints." "I have no time to learn a language." What this really means is that the person is doing something else instead of what they would want to do.
One factor, the sailor mused, is that we want way too many things at once. Nepali villagers sit outside their house and watch the bus go by.
While we wouldn’t admit it openly, we tend to look down on those poor souls because of their boring, simple lives. We are totally unlike them, with lives full of important and interesting events. We hardly manage to rush from one to the next, although we don't seem to be fully present in them.
It is difficult to imagine early man in a time-stressed world, thought Sindbad. Even in the Middle Ages, only times of day existed: morning, midday, evening dusk. Then came tower clocks with their little musical figures, then seconds, atomic clocks, milli- and nanoseconds, who knows how far engineers have succeeded in dissecting time by now. When it is obvious that for us, humans, time is relative. Hours, even years, can pass by without us noticing, while minutes tick away at meetings and at red lights with embarrassing slowness.
Sindbad got to the point with embarrassing slowness. He stalled for time.
I can't put it into words elegantly, he finally groaned. Not even bluntly. It's so obvious that there's really nothing to say. But during this trip I've experienced what it is like to live freely. Without time pressure. That doesn't mean we have to imitate the Nepalese way of building roads. Things can still be done efficiently and dynamically. And sometimes, like when you have to pull someone out from under an avalanche, it is the end result that counts. But in the modern world, we live as if we had to dig a person out of an avalanche every minute. Why live under constant external pressure? I know, there’s school, work, train schedules and everything. Yet is possible to stay centered, to retain the enjoyment of life. Things take as much time as they take. It doesn't matter how big your stash is, whether all seventy-seven rooms in your palace are cleaned or what your neighbours say, if you are not happy.
Perhaps I will be able to put it into words better at a later point in time, he mused. All I can say is that I've arrived home with a different inner state. A kind of presence that is also a decision. That all the horribly important things we imagine for ourselves, that we think we can't live without, are just that, figments of our imagination. Because we control time and not the other way around. Time is so vast, we can live in it comfortably. We can be present in every minute of it, just like when we were children.
He looked out the window into the garden filled with birdsong. The roses with orange-pink-yellow flowers waved back.