Creating Empty Time

November 08, 2007 candacemorris 2 Comments

Here is my point about my last blog,

"What I'm trying to do is say lighten up and let life flow through you, and be on the waves as they go up and down. For me, a great image in mythology is Tristan of Tristan and Isolde. He's out there on a little boat without an oar, without a rudder, on the Irish sea . . . You float your way. You drift. The essence of my approach is to be extravagantly accepting and forgiving of yourself and others. Ride the waves and let life take you where it has good things for you." - Thomas Moore

Coupled with this argument is the thought I am having today (inspired by a Thomas Moore blog AND my poetry study of Matthew Arnold's The Buried Life (http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/buriedlife.html) , is that how in the world are we to know the deepest part of ourselves, the inner life, the ever-flowing ebb of soul, if we never take a single moment for ourselves. We must reflect, we must try to learn the discipline of empty time. "We seem to have a complex about busyness in our culture," says Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul. “Most of us do have some time each day to devote to simple relaxation, but we convince ourselves that we don’t."

And yet, the harder we push, the more we need to replenish ourselves. As Stephan Rechtschaffen, author of Timeshifting, says, "Each of us needs some time that is strictly and entirely our own, and we should experience it daily."

What can we do to CREATE even five minutes of empty time?

I am going to try to do something out of my ordinary self-care...not sure what that is. Maybe crocheting tonight?

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2 comments:

UmberDove said...

There is something in the phrasing of that Thomas Moore quote - that he says "yourself" before "others," when it is so much easier to desire extravagant acceptance and forgiveness for every one else and let "yourself" just drop off the end, unaccounted for. Thank you C. I still have a great many lessons to learn, remember, and believe.

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