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“To tell you the truth, I don’t have time for that”

Francisco Miraval

A few days ago, one of my students, who is in his first year in college and learning to become a responsible adult, asked me what he should to find his call or destiny in life and then focus on following that call. I suggested that a time of reflection and meditation would help him. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have time for that”, he replied.

Then, during a conversation with a grandmother, she asked me about what would be, in my opinion, the best way for her to help raising his granddaughter, a little girl still not old enough to go to kindergarten.

I suggested to the grandmother that perhaps, when she is with her granddaughter, she should meditate and reflect about what she is discovering about herself and about the little girl in that interaction and that, in doing so, she will know how to act and when not do act. “Meditation? I don’t have time for that”, she told me.

If we don’t spend any time reflecting and meditating so we can learn about ourselves and our desires for the future and know others better, what are we doing with our time? Is there anything more important that knowing oneself and truly knowing other persons?

If we don’t have time to reflect and meditate, what are we using our time for and what are the results and benefits of using our time in such a way?

Two and a half millennia ago, at the very beginning of Western Civilization thinking in the Greek colonies in Asia Minor, Heraclitus said something to the effect that one of his greatest achievements was to have searched for himself and investigated himself.

Today, 2500 years later, the invitation to look inside is mostly unheard and unknown by most of us to the point we don’t dare to do it and we don’t even want to think about doing it. The result, as Heraclitus pointed out, was to live our lives as if we were not awake, as mindless zombies, unaware of what is really happening to us.

The student I mentioned above was expecting some kind of formula to find meaning, purpose, and direction for his life. And the grandmother wanted a “recipe” to raise her granddaughter. The idea of loving a life without formulas or recipes was unthinkable to them, as it was the idea of taking a time to know themselves.

They are like us: they fell into the trap of confusing the urgent with the important, the known things with the worthy things, the actual things with safety, the tradition with the future, the outside world with the inside world, the repetition of statements with the truth.

What I am trying to say? Absolutely nothing. Perhaps the only thing I would like to share is an invitation to escape for a moment from the overwhelming machination time and look inside ourselves so we can enjoy some existential time to meet ourselves perhaps for the first time.  

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