Sunrise and Schedules

I know she loves the sunrise
No longer sees it with her sleepy eyes
And I know that when she said she's gonna try
Well it might not work because of other ties and
I know she usually has some other ties
And I wouldn't want to break them, no, I wouldn't want to break them
Maybe she'll help me to untie this but
Until then well, I'm gonna have to lie to you.
- Jack Johnson, Flake

These past few days since I've been back, I've found myself waking up at 6:30 a.m. Actually, I've been waking up at that same time almost every day the last several weeks, even while traveling - my body clock has apparently begun to like to synchronize itself with the sunrise. It's a refreshing change: I find that I have time to take care of important stuff - prayer, cleaning up the house, breakfast, leisurely "lingering" on e-mail - with all those extra hours in the morning instead of rushing out of the house, frazzled and harassed, because I got out of bed at 10.

Early mornings, aside from giving me extra time to myself, in communion with God, also give me time to focus. My day seems to be a lot more organized, with scheduled "appointments" running almost like clockwork, and enough flexibility to accomodate spur-of-the-moment activities. Yesterday, for instance, I spent the morning cooking at the Center, and finished making the two-course meal exactly at 12 noon. Carol Anne needed company to shop for the sewing ladies' graduation party today, so I had a free hour after lunch to do that with her, after which I set off into the horrible EDSA traffic for a meeting with CYA's Lorna and Sis Shane at Shangri-la. And since Oman works in the area, we had a very pleasant couple of hours catching up over panini and coffee before I needed to head to my next meeting in Makati. Because everything moved like clockwork - my CYA meet was finished by 4, Oman and I called it a day without needing to rush or being bitin exactly at 6 - I was where I needed to be, in Greenbelt, with a few minutes to stroll around National Bookstore, by 7:00 p.m. Which gave me the opportunity for yet another "spontaneous" activity - I hadn't seen my best friend Miles for more than a month and when the editorial meeting wrapped exactly at 8:30 p.m., we had time for drinks and long-overdue chika the way only we can make chika. What a full day - especially since the main part of it was trying to do God's work - yet I was far from exhausted when I got up, at 6:30, this morning. :-) Could get used to this kind of schedule after all.

In the "life-altering" book that spoke to me during the last Holy Week, Peter Kreeft wrote very powerfully about how we should never allow time to be our master. Yesterday, I discovered how it's like to have the clock as a good friend as it cooperated with my schedule rather than despotically pressuring me through the day - I hope we remain buddies from this day forward and that I never get to use the word "toxic" when referring to my day's timetable!

Time used to be our friend. Now it is our enemy. Entertainment is called “killing time.” You don’t kill your friend. If you really want to kill time, the most effective way is suicide: that kills all of it. Killing time is slow suicide.

But we can reverse this any time we want to. All you have to do is to perform the radical, earth-changing act of “stopping and smelling the roses.” Joshua made the sun stand still and time move backward for a day. You can do something similar; you can reverse the flow of modern time which is “slip-sliding away.” How? Simply by TAKING time to do something that is not measured by clock time.

For instance, a Zen monk said, “Drinking a cup of green tea, I stopped the war.” That sounds ridiculous, but I think it is very profound and realistic and true. You can contribute mightily to peace in the world by increasing the peace and spiritual sanity first of all in yourself; and you can do that first by realigning your soul’s relation to time. Drinking tea can be a timeless moment, a deed that in its small way flows from and into eternity. We need not join mass movements to move history. History moves like families: one at a time. (For history IS the history of a family).

I dare you. Experiment. Slow down. Stop the flywheel. Get out from under the wheels of the juggernaut. Stop and smell the roses. Literally. Do it, don’t just think about it. And do other timeless things even more important than that truly radical deed of smelling roses. Pray. Without a clock. I’ll guarantee that the same thing will happen to your time if you sacrifice it to God as happened to one little boy’s five loaves and two fishes, and for the same reason it happened then.

You see, God created time, and is its master. So he can multiply it and give it back to us transformed. The offering, however, must be freely made. We must first destroy something – not time but our ownership of it, in sacrificing it to him. Once we sacrifice the bread of our time to him, he breaks that bread and multiplies it and feeds our hungry souls with it.

I do not know how he does it. But I know he does. I know this not only by faith but by experience – more the experience of failure than of success. Whenever I am too busy to give God time, I find myself even busier, and unable to do half the things I had hoped. Whenever I ruthlessly tear myself away from what I like to call my “responsibilities” but are really my idols, when I put away my watch and just rest in God’s presence, he somehow arranges it so that at the end of the day I’ve accomplished more than I had hoped.

He’ll do the same for you. I promise you. I dare you to try this simple but revolutionary, life-changing, world-changing experiment. It will unleash a power of creation greater than the power for destruction unleashed by the experiments with nuclear bombs.

It revolutionizes everything because time is a universal feature of our lives. Everything we do is in time. Not even space is that universal, for only the body is in space, not the soul. But the soul too is in time. It takes time to think just as it takes time to walk. So if we revolutionize our relationship to time, we revolutionize our whole life. - Peter Kreeft in Simplicity, from Making Choices (Practical Wisdom for Everyday Moral Decisions). Copyright @ 1990