fresh

Today not only marks the first day of Spring - the Vernal Equinox, the Sun is moving, relative to the Earth's tilt, directly over the Equator and balancing light with dark - it's also Nowruz (pronounced "no-rooz"), the Persian New Year, translated "new day."

Last night a 'Super Moon" heralded the Sun's return to the Northern Hemisphere - the largest Moon in over 18 years, the closest the Moon will be to the Earth this year, a mere 356, 575 kilometres away.

In the last week or so, we students in the massage program have begun to remark that we're into the final stages of our training (beginning our third of three months). Michael, one of the facilitators, asked us to consider that a month is a very long time - indeed, it's unlikely that any or many of us will ever again take a training of such length, many programs being held over long weekends. It got me thinking about psychological time.

While it's common to believe that time exists, time is actually something we humans constructed, a false idea we continue to perpetuate in our thinking and acting. While I do not have a full grasp on the history of how a clock or a calendar was conceived, I understand that it was devised - it was devised to correspond to the cycles of the Earth, the Moon, the Sun.

Time is not real, it's a way of making sense of the sequence of life, the way that events follow each other. Ironically, we created Time to help us understand our existence and map it so that we could communicate more easily with each other. We are a species that is now a prisoner of its own creation.

In the cartography of time, I am generally more in contact with my psychological sense of time (how long will I be waiting in line? how much longer until I retire or vacation or get home so that I can relax? when will I get to where I want to be?) than I am with the eternal Now. We have collectively traded our human experience of this precious moment - just this - for a sense of sequencing, a way to understand and conceive our reality rather than experience it. It's not about being where I am, right now. It's more about how long will I be doing this in order to get somewhere else - experience is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.

And so, rather than watching the impressive Moon rise over the sea last evening, I was attempting to photograph it, all the time wondering if I'd ever see such a Moon again ("you're not seeing it now" said a quiet voice within me).

Likewise, rather than being fully in the unfolding process of this training, sometimes I'm mapping it/me in my mind according to where I am in the sequence of psychological time.

Sometimes, however, I am walking the mile between my apartment in the ghetto and the classroom down the coast and, instead of mapping the 20 minutes in my mind, my senses are caught and captured by the experience - a young man turning countless spirals on his tripped-out bike, the combined weight and lightness of my sandals on compact red earth, a breeze bringing a scent of new blossoms across my skin.

And so, recognizing that I am not guaranteed anything in life - not another 40 years, not another trip to Portugal, not another extensive training in bodywork, not even another full breath - I decided to make today the "first day." Maybe it's the first day of training. Maybe it's the first day in this skin. Maybe it's the first day to meet myself, to meet an 'other'. Perhaps it can be a day in which I do not need to carry heavy suitcases of endless stories and beliefs of who I think I am and what this living is all about. The calendar and the clock, afterall, were likely devised not so much to manage Life but to move with it.