Life Is All About Time

If you stop for a moment, and instead of listening to sounds for whatever information they bring, instead, for a few moments, notice sound moving through time.

To do this, you will find it easier if you also notice your breath. The rising and falling of the breath acts like the ticking of a clock. It helps you notice time passing. And then you can notice sounds arising and subsiding. passing cars, airplanes, people's voices, the sound of the weather, the rain, the wind.

Now cast your mind to the most distant sound, while staying aware of the movement of your breath in the background. In this exercise, we only stay aware of the breath to help us notice the passage of time.

Stay focused on listening for distant sounds, while your awareness of the movement of the breath remains a background experience.

You will notice that your mind becomes still and calm. You've entered the present moment. A single moment constantly moving through time.

This experience is mindfulness. You can experience it whenever you want by repeating this practice.

Mindfulness is a natural human experience. It's part of our toolkit for survival in nature. It's how we monitor our environment as we move through nature. We unlearn this skill by living in the modern world. Modern life becomes a long continuous path of time which includes all of our past and all of the future. The present moment becomes something to get past so we can get to the future. And our mind constantly searches the path of the past and the future for solutions to problems that we believe we need to solve.

When we step into the present moment with no expectations of solving any problems it leaves behind the problem-solving mind loops and we experience the present moment.

Then, because of this stillness and calmness, the answers to all of those problems arise in our minds.

This is called Insight.

And this practice is called Meditation.