Do you even wake up in cold sweat in the middle of the night with the intense sensation that you are missing something? Many people share dreams of running late, forgetting something important or crashing in a car/plane without control. Although it is hard to identify meaning for everyone these scenarios hold a common theme: the fear of time running out. Our linear minds come up with many common phrases to speak to this felt energy that we share and support as a collective: “It seems like just yesterday”, “Where did the time go?”, “Hurry Up! We will be late.” It has become consistently embedded into our conversations that I feel myself in a hurry to go, well, nowhere really. In a hurry to grab the mail from the mailbox! The to-do list becomes that focal point of our awareness and the task of laundry, oil change and changing the air conditioner filter consumes our mental awareness. This process shuts down our unique human ability to create lives of love. It shuts down our hearts.
I recently heard an interview that stated out of all the mammals in the animal kingdom the human is the only one that turns to watch the sunset. We don’t see dogs pausing on their walks to take in the colorful skies or birds pausing during the sun’s nightly show. We are the only species that has the capacity to marvel in life’s beauty. The movement of trees with the wind. The floating clouds spreading and collapsing into each other again. We have the capacity to understand the rich balance of the seasons. Humans have the ability to feel deeply and that alone gives our lives meaning and beauty.
Why does it have to be so hard though? Why can’t our roles be to witness beauty and not feel rejection, shame, guilt, betrayal, and loneliness amongst other hard emotions? Our moments of suffering are when we are buying tickets to the narrative of separateness. It is the part of us that wants to feel connection but also wants to be the one that is right. We can’t be in the story and tell it at the same time.
These dreams we are having speak to one of the greatest challenges of our time. Will time run out before we fully remember our goodness? Will time run out before we learn how to love? Learn how to forgive? Will it be too late to care for our internal ecosystem of the body and the external ecosystem of the world?
WHAT NOW?
We are going to have to sit with the darkest corners of our fears without distracting, numbing and keeping busy. We are going to have to stop doing things the “right ways” that we were told. Marriage. Religion. There is no roadmap. There is no template. We have our gut instincts and our compassionate heart and those will become our weapons for change. It is time to stop talking about the world’s problems, our problems, their problems. It is time to get quiet. It is time to move beyond our reactionary set points and into radical conversations of ways to serve and uplift each other. Time is precious when you treat it that way.